ABSTRACT
The utilitarian school of political economists was more strenuously opposed than is sometimes realized. Economic laissez-faire was attacked as vicious, materialistic, redundant and ultimately self-destructive by Tory philanthropists, apologists for the aristocracy, literary social critics, some evangelical churchmen, and proto-socialists. It is interesting to speculate why, given the range of this opposition, the ‘Manchester School’ captured the minds of most men of influence to such an extent that some historians have dubbed the period 1830–70 one of pure laissez-faire.
