“Perhaps because so much of what the classical economists wrote about traditional systems of agricultural production was divorced from the seemingly more timeless remarks about pure theory, later readers have passed over such portions of their works in haste. … I argue that these interventionist recommendations were a significant element in the overall thrust of their works. Specifically, classical political economy advocated restricting the viability of traditional occupations in the countryside to coerce people to work for wages.”

— Michael Perelman

Source: The Invention of Capitalism: Classical Political Economy and the Secret History of Primitive Accumulation (2000), p. 3

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Michael Perelman3

American economist 1939

Michael Perelman (1939) American economist

Source: The Invention of Capitalism: Classical Political Economy and the Secret History of Primitive Accumulation (2000), p. 2

“Most people in Britain did not enthusiastically engage in wage labor—at least so long as they had an alternative. To make sure that people accepted wage labor, the classical political economists actively advocated measures to deprive people of their traditional means of support.”

Michael Perelman (1939) American economist

Source: The Invention of Capitalism: Classical Political Economy and the Secret History of Primitive Accumulation (2000), p. 2

“The entire thrust of neoclassical thought is to argue that the free market economy is an efficient system that will optimize utility for all mankind, if only government will get out of the way. It therefore departs from classical economists such as Adam Smith, who recognized the importance of governments for regulating markets and preventing monopolies.”

David Orrell (1962) Canadian mathematician

Source: The Other Side Of The Coin (2008), Chapter 9, Square Versus Oblong, p. 284

“There are comparatively few significant inefficiencies in the allocation of the factors of production in traditional agriculture.”

Theodore Schultz (1902–1998) American economist

Source: "Transforming traditional agriculture," 1964, p. 37

“The whole Marxian system springs from classical political economy as it found expression in Ricardo.”

Eric Roll, Baron Roll of Ipsden (1907–2005) British economist

Source: A History of Economic Thought (1939), Chapter IV, The Classical System, p. 193

“I had this sense that ideas about democracy, theories of democracy which I had learned about of course from graduate school on, from Aristotle and Plato onward, that they were inadequate. I don’t want to diminish them; I have always retained a great respect for classical and medieval and eighteenth-century theory, but meanwhile a whole new kind of political system emerged to which the term democracy became attached, and for which democracy remained an ideal, even though classical democracy as an ideal was so far removed from reality. The gap between that ideal and the actual political institutions that had developed, particularly from about the sixteenth, seventeenth century on, was just enormous. And what we didn’t have enough of, had very little of, was an adequate description of what the actual institutions of so-called democracy, modern democracy, representative democracy, were.”

Robert A. Dahl (1915–2014) American political scientist

A Conversation with Robert A. Dahl (2009)

“The fundamental differences between Marxian and traditional orthodox economics are, first, that the orthodox economists accept the capitalist system as part of the eternal order of Nature, while Marx regards it as a passing phase in the transition from the feudal economy of the past to the socialist economy of the future.”

Joan Robinson book An Essay on Marxian Economics

Source: An Essay on Marxian Economics (Second Edition) (1966), Chapter I, Introduction, p. 1

“Classical organization theory suffers from "ethnocentrism": It ignores the significance of the political, social, and economic milieu in shaping organizations and influencing managerial practice.”

Douglas McGregor (1906–1964) American professor

Source: The Human Side of Enterprise (1960), p. 16 (p. 23 in 2006 edition)

“In general the claim can be supported that a view of classical political economy as committed to extreme laissez-faire or unmitigated economic individualism misrepresents or at the very least analytically overgeneralizes their circumscribed theoretical and practical aims. In general then, with regard to both political and economic liberty, the classical political economists might be seen to be united in their efforts to theorize and systematize the productive and allocating functions of the mechanism of the market as the most efficient means to engender the growth of wealth. At the same time, classicals such as Smith, Malthus, Ricardo, and Mill recognized that the market, of necessity, operated in a larger context of restriction – not only legal, but equally as important, within political, religious, moral, and conventional restrictions – which could not be readily or in some cases even desirably overcome.”

Shannon C. Stimson (1951) American political theorist

"Classical Political Economy", in Coole, Diana H.; Gibbons, Michael; Ellis, Elisabeth et al., The encyclopedia of political thought (2014); see also Adam Smith

“Wednesdays were the best thing about Atlantis. The middle of the week was a traditional holiday there. Everyone stopped work and celebrated the fact that half the week was over.”

Walter Moers The 13½ Lives of Captain Bluebear

Source: The 13½ Lives of Captain Bluebear

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