The Success of Mill's Principles
Abstract
John Stuart Mill’s Principles of Political Economy was published on 25 April 1848.
It was written with a high moralistic tone and sustained ethical earnestness hitherto
absent from economic discussion. But it was at the same time a major economic treatise,
and in its overall conception and execution it challenged the Wealth of Nations in
a way no other English treatise had done, and no other would, until Marshall’s Principles
(1 890). It was not merely the longest work in political economy since the Wealth
of Nations; Mill actually set out to emulate and to supplant Smith’s classic. His
own work, he explained in the Preface, was an attempt “to combine [Smith’s] practical
mode of treating his subject with the increased knowledge since acquired of its theory
[and] to exhibit the economical phenomena of society in the relation in which they
stand to the best social ideas of the present.,.t@e,,G,ahse did, with such admirable
success, in reference to the philosophy of his century.” The Principles was rapidly
successful; and so completely so that, as Foxwell later noted, “English economists,
for a whole generation, were men of one book.”2
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https://hdl.handle.net/10161/2646Published Version (Please cite this version)
10.1215/00182702-6-2-119Publication Info
de Marchi, NB (1974). The Success of Mill's Principles. 10.1215/00182702-6-2-119. Retrieved from https://hdl.handle.net/10161/2646.This is constructed from limited available data and may be imprecise. To cite this
article, please review & use the official citation provided by the journal.
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