Popular Political Economy

Abstract

In a remarkable discursive revolution, a variety of economic languages (customary, mercantilist, protectionist, proto-socialist) which competed in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were replaced in early Victorian Britain by a ‘hegemonic’ language of liberal political economy at whose centre lay not an abstract concept of the market but a popular notion of free trade. This common language had largely united elite and popular political worlds by the second half of the nineteenth century, creating a powerful supra-party value, which remained uniquely dominant in British political culture before 1914, despite the emergence of powerful alternatives on both the right and the left.¹ In part this political language possessed a coherent content deriving from a canonical body of economic doctrine (‘the laws of political economy’) whose diffusion had in turn marginalised competing economic languages. Yet its appeal extended beyond its scientific authority, for it resonated with a whole range of different languages, ranging from those of religion, where free trade became part of a providential vision of order and redemption, to patriotism, for free trade was easily melded into the birthright of the ‘free-born Englishman’, as readily traceable in the Saxon realm of King Offa as it was in the pages of Smith’s Wealth of Nations.² It also proved malleable, responsive to changing economic idioms, but also able to incorporate new languages such as that of Darwinism, whose intellectual genesis was intimately linked to that of political economy.³