Economic Liberalism as Ideology: The Appleby Version

Abstract

For some years now Joyce Oldham Appleby has been engaged on a sequence of studies that together comprise an interlocking reinterpretation of the history of Anglo-American liberalism treated largely as an economic ideology. Her first book on Economic Thought and Ideology in Seventeenth-Century England has recently been complemented by another entitled Capitalism and a New Social Order which extends her method and findings to Jeffersonian America at the beginning of the nineteenth century.' Both works contain an interesting amalgam of economic, social and intellectual history, where the last component encompasses both popular belief systems and treatments of the role played by ideological innovators. Since the ideology in question derives much of its content from distinctive and often quite abstract economic ideas, Appleby finds herself involved in the formal history of economic analysis even when the social and political connotations of the ideology appear to occupy the centre of the stage. While economic historians, notably D. C. Coleman, have provided critical assessments of Appleby's first book, considered as a contribution to English economic history and the debate on mercantilism,2 my main concern will be with the broader historiographic underpinnings of the Appleby version of the history of liberal ideology as revealed by her two books and related articles.