Andrew's Wiki
Illustrations Political Economy

Martineau

• Influential editorial writer, historian, and social scientist
• Popularized Ricardo, Malthus, Comte, Bentham, Smith
• Wrote over 100 books
• Rallied people to her causes: anti-slavery, nursing
• Radical feminist
• Rationalism and progressivism
• Gayle Graham Yates: “Long before the coining of the word ‘feminist’ and thirty years before the beginning of an organized women’s rights campaign in England, Harriet Martineau was a wide-ranging, progressive, and thorough-going feminist in nearly every sense in which that word is used today.”

Illustrations of Political Economy

• Two influences, Hannah More’s Cheap Repository Tracts in 1790s, and Jane Marcet’s Conversations on Political Economy 1816; but nonetheless she makes a new genre by herself (the novel that teaches P E: before the time when the novel was without a doubt defined as entertainment)
• 24 tales designed to teach the community what they needed to know about political economy and its practical effects; shows a fictional town during an economic crisis and exhibits people doing things that make it better or worse
  • would choose a particular economic doctrine to outline, list its main points, and then think of proper geography, characters, and events to illustrate them: her “writing went off…like a letter” (me: showing how Carlyle was right, her writing is a machine)
  • each part ends with “Summary of the Principles Illustrated in This Tale”
  • three years, beginning in 1832; quite popular
  • part of the larger boom in the 20s and 30s of popular literature about politics, autonomy, change; part of the larger swing towards popular literacy
    • why? she says people have to educate themselves about political economy before approaching the government for change; before gov will take them seriously, they need to know some things: you are “obligated” to know this stuff
    • “few grand principles, if generally understood, would gradually remove all the obstructions, and remedy the distresses, and equalize the lot of the population”
• She popularizes political economy
  • Who read em? Princess Victoria, Coleridge, Peel, Nightingale
  • Spectator says she is “one of the benefactors of the species”
  • Ruling classes and publishing world all think it “useful” to let the masses understand P E
• Autobiography: “It struck me at once that the principles of the whole science might be advantageously conveyed in the same way, � not by being smothered up in a story, but by being exhibited in their natural workings in selected passages of social life”
  • In general, she applauded novelists talking about industrial revolution, about economy: “What can afford finer moral scenery than the transition state in which society now is!”
    • E P Thompson: b/c of the steam engine, people are crowded together; like England had been put in a “crucible” in 1790 and came out after Napoleonic Wars completely diff society
• 130 pages each, aimed at operative class and lower middle class
• Overall lesson: we are in an interdependent economy, like one big household
  • Plus, free trade (no government intervention)
    • Although you do see her intervening in government affairs constantly
  • Self-help and self-sufficiency
  • Condemns combinations (says no no no! to Luddites)
    • You need to work along with management, not against it: tried to say they both have the same interest, profit
    • Says this kind of violence and striking will turn “temporary into permanent ruin”
    • Instead, “patience the best policy,” As one of her subtitles said
  • Ricardian doctrine of wages-fund: wages depend on market fluctuations
  • You won’t get what you want via revolution
• Pro New Poor Law 1834
  • Mood of the 30s: reform in order to avoid revolution

A Manchester Strike (1834)

• Her best-known one
• Malthusian economics: you did it yourself b/c you produced too many children, so you must restrict your reproduction to solve the problem
  • People have noted (like Gallagher) that it’s self-contradictory b/c the pious daughter Martha seems to say children are gonna be good
• Strikes won’t work because your wages depend on the availability of labor
• Is sympathetic to workers, but doesn’t give them any slack in her recommendations
  • Martineau does tell it like it is in certain respects: the disgusting cramped lodgings; the repetitive monotony of the work; the foul atmosphere of the factory
  • But she has the overseer acting kindly, as if he can’t help he’s making her work
• The melancholy, intelligent Allen with his limping daughter Martha, sickly industrious 8 year old; he is chosen to represent the workers to management (this is an example of combination) and as a result is used as a scapegoat, loses his job, can’t find another b/c the other capitalists won’t hired a disgraced worker from another factory, and has to be a streetsweeper. DONT COMBINE
• Its Principles: wages fund theory, where there is a set amount of money for the laborers, and how much you get depends on the number of workers: the proportion of capital to labor
  • Population increases faster than capital
  • Lowest wage: that which secures only subsistence; highest wage: that which still leaves enough profit to tempt the capitalist to invest. Between those two, is dependent on labor supply.
    • Strikes and government intervention won’t fix or change this proportion
    • All you can do is create more capital by inventing or by saving, or by having fewer kids.

Some Dates

• 1776 Wealth of Nations, Smith
• 1817 Ricardo
• 1830 Mc Culloch?