Shannon C. Stimson

Few deny that the work of economists has often embodied or stimulated significant contributions to political thought. Smith, Keynes, Hayek, and Friedman are good examples. However, the work of the great classical economist David Ricardo is not usually placed in such company. Despite Ricardo's affiliations with philosophical radicals like Bentham and James Mill, the most that previous scholars have been prepared to allow is that if Ricardo spoke to political questions at all, he addressed only economic policy. This book argues forcefully for a revision of that received opinion. Murray Milgate and Shannon Stimson show that Ricardo articulated a distinctive political vision, and that he did so in a novel and sophisticated way by linking arguments for democratic reform with the conclusions of political economy. Ricardian Politics examines compelling but neglected evidence of how Ricardo deployed economic theory to construct a new view of politics. Milgate and Stimson analyze the case he made for a more inclusive political society and for a more representative and democratic government, discuss how his argument was structured by his economics, and explicitly draw out comparisons with Bentham and James Mill. Ricardo wrote at a critical moment, which saw the consolidation of capitalist industry and the emergence of modern democratic political ideology. By attending to the historical context, this book recovers a more accurate picture of his thought, while contributing to the current renewal of research on the relationship between economic and political thought in early nineteenth-century Britain. Originally published in 1991. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

In 1773 John Adams observed that one source of tension in the debate between England and the colonies could be traced to the different conceptions each side had of the terms "legally" and "constitutionally"--different conceptions that were, as Shannon Stimson here demonstrates, symptomatic of deeper jurisprudential, political, and even epistemological differences between the two governmental outlooks. This study of the political and legal thought of the American revolution and founding period explores the differences between late eighteenth-century British and American perceptions of the judicial and jural power. In Stimson's book, which will interest both historians and theorists of law and politics, the study of colonial juries provides an incisive tool for organizing, interpreting, and evaluating various strands of American political theory, and for challenging the common assumption of a basic unity of vision of the roots of Anglo-American jurisprudence. The author introduces an original concept, that of "judicial space," to account for the development of the highly political role of the Supreme Court, a judicial body that has no clear counterpart in English jurisprudence. Originally published in 1990. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Few deny that the work of economists has often embodied or stimulated significant contributions to political thought. Smith, Keynes, Hayek, and Friedman are good examples. However, the work of the great classical economist David Ricardo is not usually placed in such company. Despite Ricardo's affiliations with philosophical radicals like Bentham and James Mill, the most that previous scholars have been prepared to allow is that if Ricardo spoke to political questions at all, he addressed only economic policy. This book argues forcefully for a revision of that received opinion. Murray Milgate and Shannon Stimson show that Ricardo articulated a distinctive political vision, and that he did so in a novel and sophisticated way by linking arguments for democratic reform with the conclusions of political economy. Ricardian Politics examines compelling but neglected evidence of how Ricardo deployed economic theory to construct a new view of politics. Milgate and Stimson analyze the case he made for a more inclusive political society and for a more representative and democratic government, discuss how his argument was structured by his economics, and explicitly draw out comparisons with Bentham and James Mill. Ricardo wrote at a critical moment, which saw the consolidation of capitalist industry and the emergence of modern democratic political ideology. By attending to the historical context, this book recovers a more accurate picture of his thought, while contributing to the current renewal of research on the relationship between economic and political thought in early nineteenth-century Britain. Originally published in 1991. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

In 1773 John Adams observed that one source of tension in the debate between England and the colonies could be traced to the different conceptions each side had of the terms "legally" and "constitutionally"--different conceptions that were, as Shannon Stimson here demonstrates, symptomatic of deeper jurisprudential, political, and even epistemological differences between the two governmental outlooks. This study of the political and legal thought of the American revolution and founding period explores the differences between late eighteenth-century British and American perceptions of the judicial and jural power. In Stimson's book, which will interest both historians and theorists of law and politics, the study of colonial juries provides an incisive tool for organizing, interpreting, and evaluating various strands of American political theory, and for challenging the common assumption of a basic unity of vision of the roots of Anglo-American jurisprudence. The author introduces an original concept, that of "judicial space," to account for the development of the highly political role of the Supreme Court, a judicial body that has no clear counterpart in English jurisprudence. Originally published in 1990. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Few issues are more central to our present predicaments than the relationship between economics and politics. In the century after Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations the British economy was transformed. After Adam Smith looks at how politics and political economy were articulated and altered. It considers how grand ideas about the connections between individual liberty, free markets, and social and economic justice sometimes attributed to Smith are as much the product of gradual modifications and changes wrought by later writers. Thomas Robert Malthus, David Ricardo, James Mill, John Stuart Mill, and other liberals, radicals, and reformers had a hand in conceptual transformations that culminated in the advent of neoclassical economics. The population problem, the declining importance of agriculture, the consequences of industrialization, the structural characteristics of civil society, the role of the state in economic affairs, and the possible limits to progress were questions that underwent significant readjustments as the thinkers who confronted them in different times and circumstances reworked the framework of ideas advanced by Smith--transforming the dialogue between politics and political economy. By the end of the nineteenth century an industrialized and globalized market economy had firmly established itself. By exploring how questions Smith had originally grappled with were recast as the economy and the principles of political economy altered during the nineteenth century, this book demonstrates that we are as much the heirs of later images of Smith as we are of Smith himself. Many writers helped shape different ways of thinking about economics and politics after Adam Smith. By ignoring their interventions we risk misreading our past--and also misusing it--when thinking about the choices at the interface of economics and politics that confront us today.

The only student edition of Calhoun's writings available, this volume offers the Disquisition in its entirety along with two key selections from the Discourse: Formation of the Federal Period and A Plural Executive Proposed.

This study of the political and legal thought of the American Revolution and founding period explores the differences in the perceptions of judicial and jural power that characterized the conditions of law in late 18th century America, as compared to her British counterparts.