The Introduction and Critical Reception of Marxist Thought in Britain, 1850–1900

Abstract

An economic theory implies an ethical system, a political purpose, and a psychological hypothesis. Throughout almost the entire nineteenth century in Britain laissez-faire capitalism, with its concomitant values of personal thrift and industry, parliamentary government, and promise of social mobility through self-improvement, was triumphant. Many, if not most, Englishmen believed that the classical political economists had discovered and formulated the ‘laws of political economy’ in the same ineluctable manner that Isaac Newton had determined the laws of physics. ‘To many’, as G. Kitson Clark has written, the political economists ‘were the best minds in the country whose teaching it was folly to question and disastrous to disobey’. However much Englishmen might deplore the social and human consequences of the operation of the ‘laws of political economy’, most were convinced that opposition to those ‘laws’ was futile.