FREE ESSAY ON CLASSICAL ECONOMISTS VS UTOPIAN SOCIALISTS

CLASSICAL ECONOMISTS VS UTOPIAN SOCIALISTS

There are many ways that to govern a country. Obviously, officials run most countries, but
what kind of system do they govern by? Some of the most important systems used today are
capitalism, socialism, and communism.
As a coherent economic theory, classical economics start with Smith, continues with the
British Economists Thomas Robert Malthus and David Ricardo. Although differences of
opinion were numerous among the classical economists in the time span between Smith's
Wealth of Nations and Ricardo's Principles of Political Economy and Taxation, they all
mainly agreed on major principles. All believed in private property, free markets, and,
in Smith's words, " The individual pursuit of private gain to increase the public good."
They shared Smith's strong suspicion of government and his enthusiastic confidence in the
power of self-interest represented by his famous "invisible hand," which reconciled
public benefit with personal quest of private gain. From Ricardo, classicists derived the
notion of diminishing returns, which held that as more labor and capital were applied to
land yields after a certain and not very advanced stage in the progress of agriculture
steadily diminished. 
The central thesis of The Wealth of Nations is that capital is best employed for the
production and distribution of wealth under conditions of governmental noninterference,
or laissez-faire, and free trade. In Smith's view, the production and exchange of goods
can be stimulated, and a consequent rise in the general standard of living attained, only
through the efficient operations of private industrial and commercial entrepreneurs
acting with a minimum of regulation and control by the governments. To explain this
concept of government maintaining laissez-faire attitude toward the commercial endeavors,
Smith proclaimed the principle of the "invisible hand": Every individual in pursuing his
or her own good is led, as if by an invisible hand, to achieve the best good for all.
Therefore any interference with free competition by government is almost certain to be
injurious.
Although this view has undergone considerable modification by economists in the light of
historical developments since Smith's time, many sections of The Wealth of Nations
notably those relating to the sources of income and the nature of capital, have continued
to form the basis of modern American politics and economy. The Wealth of Nations has also
served as a guide to the formulation of governmental economic policies.
Malthus, on the other hand, in his book An Essay on the Principle of Population conveyed
a tone of dreariness. Malthus's main contribution to economics was his theory that a
population tends to increase faster than the supply of food available for its needs. This
theory contradicted the belief prevailing in the early 19th century that a society's
fertility would lead to economic progress. Malthus's theory was often used as an argument
against efforts to better the condition of the poor. Food, he believed, would increase in
arithmetic ratio (2-4-6-8-10), but population tended to double in each generation
(2-4-8-16-32) unless that doubling was ruled out by "natural selection". According to
Malthus' natures checks and balances were positive: "The power of population is so
superior to the power of the earth to produce subsistence for man, that premature death
must in some shape or other visit the human race." The forms it took included war,
epidemics, pestilence and plague, human vices and famine, all combining to level the
world's population with the world's food supply.
The only escape from over-population and the horrors of the so-called, "positive check"
was in voluntary limitation of population, not by contraception, rejected on religious
grounds by Malthus, but by late marriage and, consequently smaller families. These
pessimistic doctrines of classical economists earned for economics the nature of the
"dismal science".
The writings of Malthus encouraged the first systematic demographic studies. They also
influenced subsequent economists, particularly David Ricardo, whose "iron law of wages"
and the "theory of distribution of wealth" contains some elements of Malthus's theory. In
his major work, Principles of Political Economy and Taxation, Ricardo offered several
theories based on his studies of the long-range distribution of wealth. Ricardo feared
increasing population would lead to a shortage of productive land. He supported the
classical theory of international trade, emphasizing national specialization of freedom
of competition. 
Although representation of the classical economist has changed throughout time, its basis
is still the center for most political guidelines. In everyday life we live, breathe, and
work in conditions that have been set forth previously by all three, Smith, Malthus, and
Ricardo It's hard to imagine an economy, for that matter, a world without these natural
ways of being and diversity.
Unlike its counter part modern socialism is, in its essence, the direct product of the
recognition, on the one hand, of the class antagonisms existing in the society of today
between proprietors and non-proprietors, between capitalists and wage-workers; on the
other hand, of the anarchy existing in production. But, in its theoretical form, modern
socialism originally appears ostensibly as a more logical extension of the principles
laid down by the great Utopian Socialists of the 18th century. Like every new theory,
modern Socialism had, at first, to connect itself with the "intellectual stock-in-trade
ready to its hand, however deeply its roots lay in material economic facts."
One of the few born leaders of men, Robert Owen came up with the idea of a "perfect"
factory system. Owen had adopted the teaching of the materialistic philosophers: that
man's character is the product, on the one hand, of heredity; on the other, of the
environment of the individual during his lifetime, and especially during his period of
development. Owen believed that society's ills could be solved by improving their living
and working conditions. 
During the industrial revolution most of Owen's class was exposed only to chaos and
confusion, and the opportunity of making large fortunes quickly. He saw in it the
opportunity of putting into practice his favorite theory, and so of bringing order out of
chaos. He had already tried it with success, as superintendent of more than 500 men in a
Manchester factory. From 1800 to 1829, he directed the great cotton mill at New Lanark,
in Scotland, as managing partner, along the same lines, but with greater freedom of
action and with a success that made him a European reputation. A population, originally
consisting of the most diverse and, for the most part, very demoralized elements, a
population that gradually grew to 2,500, he turned into a model colony, in which
drunkenness, police, magistrates, lawsuits, poor laws, charity, were unknown. And all
this simply by placing the people in conditions worthy of human beings, and especially by
carefully bringing up the rising generation. He was the founder of infant schools, and
introduced them first at New Lanark. When a crisis in cotton stopped work for four
months, his workers received their full wages all the time. And with all this the
business more than doubled in value, and to the last yielded large profits to its
proprietors. The people took advantage of these bettered conditions. Owen did not have
restrictions, and as a result productivity began to decrease rapidly, and ultimately the
factory lost money.
Saint-Simon was a son of the great French Revolution. Born a nobleman, he was precocious
for his society's day and age. He believed that technology was the key to the future,
without service and technology society would not be able to flourish. Simone understood
that industrialization was the key to higher living. Unlike his classical economic
counterparts, Simone opposed the exploitation of nature, but especially of man. 
Charles Fourier, was one of the few unique utopian socialists. He believed that man
should only perform work that man enjoys engaging in, agreeable work. In Fourier we find
a criticism of the existing conditions of society. 
.He confronts the material and moral misery of the bourgeois world with the earlier
philosophers' promises of a society in which reason alone should reign, of a civilization
in which happiness should be universal, of an endless human perfectibility, and the
phraseology of the bourgeois ideologists of his time. He depicts, with equal power and
charm, the shop-keeping spirit prevalent in, and characteristic of, French commerce at
that time. The ideal harmonious state of his Brook Farm experiment, a phalanstery south
of Boston attracted little attention. 
He was the first to declare that in any given society the degree of woman's emancipation
is the natural measure of the general emancipation. He proves "that the civilized stage
raises every vice practiced by barbarism in a simple fashion into a form of existence,
complex, ambiguous, equivocal, hypocritical -- that civilization moves in a vicious
circle, in contradictions which it constantly reproduces without being able to solve
them. This is how he constantly arrives at the very opposite to that which he wants to
attain, or pretends to want to attain, under civilization poverty is born of
superabundance itself. 
The last of the French utopian socialists, by the name of Louis Blanqui believed in
natural workshops and the idea of the government standing as an employment agency.
Bibliography
HET Pages: The Classical Ricardian System, the General Glut Controversy, Classical
Growth, the Bullionist Controversy, Classical Theory of Money, 
Ricardo in Parliament, by Edwin Cannan 1894, EJ 
The Development of Ricardo's Theory of Value by Jacob Hollander, 1904, QJE 
The Development of the Theory of Money From Adam Smith to David Ricardo by Jacob
Hollander, 1910, QJE 
The British Economists by John Shield Nicholson, 1907. 
The Progress of Political Economy: Review of Ricardo and de Quincey, 1848, Southern
Quarterly Review 
David Ricardo by G. de Vivo from New Palgrave, 1987, at Univ. Marburge (PDF Version)