ABSTRACT
In his important study, The Making of the English Working Class (1963), E.P.Thompson revived two familiar themes of nineteenth century romantic and socialist literaturecondemnation of the social evils of the industrial revolution and bitter criticism of the classical economists; and in his treatment of the latter he went far beyond either the Hammonds or the Webbs. It was Arnold Toynbee who remarked that the protracted debate between the disciples of Ricardo and the human beings had ended with ‘the conversion of the economists’,1 and as this caricature of the classical economist as the personification of man’s congenital inhumanity to man has long been popular among undergraduates, it is worth re-examining the original with some care.
