Political Economy For The People By George Tucker

Southern slaveholders proudly pronounced themselves orthodox Christians, who accepted responsibility for the welfare of the people who worked for them. They proclaimed that their slaves enjoyed a better and more secure life than any laboring class in the world. Now, did it not follow that the lives of laborers of all races across the world would be immeasurably improved by their enslavement? In the Old South but in no other slave society a doctrine emerged among leading clergymen, politicians, and intellectuals - 'Slavery in the Abstract', which declared enslavement the best possible condition for all labor regardless of race. They joined the Socialists, whom they studied, in believing that the free-labor system, wracked by worsening class warfare, was collapsing. A vital question: to what extent did the people of the several social classes of the South accept so extreme a doctrine? That question lies at the heart of this book.

This document was the first in the four-volume series, The Life and Philosophy of George Tucker, published by Thoemmes Press in 2004, which is now out of print. Volumes 2-4 were facsimile reprints of, respectively, Essays on Various Subjects of Taste, Morals, and National Policy (1822), A Voyage to the Moon; with some Account of the Manners and Customs, Science and Philosophy, of the People of Morosofia, and other Lunarians (1827), and Essays, Moral and Metaphysical (1860). Volume 1 was a newly-edited version of his autobiography and several of his philosophical essays that appeared in pamphlets or periodicals.

Due to the enormous influence of Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations on Western liberal economics, a tradition closely linked to the United States, many scholars assume that early American economists were committed to Smith’s ideas of free trade and small government. Debunking this belief, Christopher W. Calvo provides a comprehensive history of the nation’s economic thought from 1790 to 1860, tracing the development of a uniquely American understanding of capitalism. The Emergence of Capitalism in Early America shows how American economists challenged, adjusted, and adopted the ideas of European thinkers such as Adam Smith, David Ricardo, and Thomas Malthus to suit their particular interests. Calvo not only explains the divisions between American free trade and the version put forward by Smith, but he also discusses the sharp differences between northern and southern liberal economists. Emergent capitalism fostered a dynamic discourse in early America, including a homegrown version of socialism burgeoning in antebellum industrial quarters, as well as a reactionary brand of conservative economic thought circulating on slave plantations across the Old South. This volume also traces the origins and rise of nineteenth-century protectionism, a system that Calvo views as the most authentic expression of American political economy. Finally, Calvo examines early Americans’ awkward relationship with capitalism’s most complex institution—finance. Grounded in the economic debates, Atlantic conversations, political milieu, and material realities of the antebellum era, this book demonstrates that American thinkers fused different economic models, assumptions, and interests into a unique hybrid-capitalist system that shaped the trajectory of the nation’s economy.

Many economists who struggled to establish a secure place for their discipline in American universities in the nineteenth century made significant contributions to reshaping American academic life in general. Yet, they were often at war among themselves as they sought to define the mission and methods of economics in an era of social and intellectual ferment. This volume represents the contribution of American scholars to a multinational research project on the institutionalization of political economy in European, Japanese, and North American universities. It includes case studies of divergent experiences of fourteen institutions that figured prominently in the molding of American culture: William & Mary, The University of Virginia, South Carolina College, Brown, Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Johns Hopkins, The University of Pennsylvania, The University of Chicago, The University of California, Stanford, The University of Wisconsin, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. These are supplemented in an essay by A. W. Coats on the turbulent early decades of the American Economic Association. In this new introduction, Barber takes note of the fact that in a somewhat different context and with a modified rhetoric the same issues present themselves today as they did one hundred years earlier. And this in turn introduces some troubling concerns about just what sort of science economics is, and was. The volume as a whole can be read as reflections on the troubled status of the discipline of economics as it now exists in American university and research contexts. It provides fresh perspectives on the development of social science and economic thought and on the history of higher education in the United States. As such it will be of very great interest to professional economists, students of higher education, and those for whom the life of American ideas holds a central place.

Contents.--pt. 1. Titles of books in the Virginia State Library which relate to Virginia and Virginians, the titles of those books written by Virginians, and of those printed in Virginia, but not including ... published official documents.--pt. 2. Titles of the printed official documents of the Commonwealth, 1776-1916.--pt. 3. The Acts and Journals of the General Assembly of the Colony, 1619-1776.--pt. 4. Three series of sessional documents of the House of Delegates: ... January 7-April 4, 1861 ... September 15-October 6, 1862; and .. January 7-March 31, 1863.--pt. 5. Titles of the printed documents of the Commonwealth, 1916-1925.