ABSTRACT
Narrowing its scope in the nineteenth century, political economy put its money on the principle of competition to claim the beneficial effects of commercial society. Socialists rallied against competition as a beneficial mechanism in the face of inequalities of property and power. In the development of English socialist thought, from Owen to Marx, bourgeois economics was increasingly attacked on its own terms. Marx tried to expose competition as a malevolent, oppressive mechanism for the benefit of the few by showing the inconsistencies and contradictions of an economic system founded upon profit and accumulation of capital. The classical era produced two opposing narratives.
