Eric Roll (1907 – 2005)
Academic economist, public servant, and banker.
The second difficulty inherent in the contradictory character of the commodity is this: a commodity must have use value, but not for its owner, for if it had, it would cease to be a commodity.
In its origins the utility school was strongly influenced by a desire to strengthen the potentially apologetic character of economics.
Adam Smith himself was under no allusion about the desire of individuals, particularly business men, to create privileged positions for themselves.
Profit can only arise upon alienation, i.e. in the act of exchange, when the seller sells more dearly than he has bought.
Christ, addressing Himself to the labourers of His time, proclaimed for the first time the worthiness both in material and a spiritual sense of all work.
The whole Marxian system springs from classical political economy as it found expression in Ricardo.
The physiocrats started a train of thought which was a powerful stimulus to the development of a labour theory of value and surplus value.They did not, however develop such a theory of value themselves. What attention they gave to the problem of exchange-value and price produced results of an altogether different character. Thus while one of their contributions finds its continuation in Smith, Ricardo, and Marx, the other leads to the post-classical supply and demand and utility theories of value.
It is generally conceded that mercantile capitalism preceded and prepared the ground for modern industrial capitalism.
Marx's prognosis of the future of the capitalist system has often been understood to imply a fatalistic view. Marx's own life should be enough to show that this is not so. Marx did not regard man as the impotent plaything of supernatural; but he thought that man could not ignore the laws of physical nature.
Aristotle laid the foundation of the distinction between use-value and exchange-value, which has remained a part of economic thought to the present day.
Capitalism had been more revolutionary then any previous social system. It had swept away without scruples old institutions and modes of thought, if they were found to stand in its way.
Ideas appropriate to a past social order have a strange power of influencing thought and action within a later institutional frame work.
Those who claim that Marx invented the ides of the class struggle should read not only his English socialist forerunners, but also a man like Burke.
Robbed of a foundation of political philosophy on which (how ever illegitimately) it had based itself, economics is in great danger of becoming a plaything of demagogy.
Mill sought to strengthen his defence of trade unions not by denying their possible monopoly effects, but by an appeal to the principle of laisser faire itself. To prevent the formation of corporate unions was, he thought, to interfere with a right obviously included in the general rule of freedom of contract.
Whatever his merits as an economist, Hume's place as one of the foremost exponents of capitalism is clearly established. His views on the landed interest and his recognition of self-interest and his desire for accumulation as the driving forces of economic activity in his time helped to consolidate the forces that were struggling to add political power to the economic supremacy which they had already achieved.
Since the earth can yield its cultivator more then he needs for his own subsistence, the surplus can be appropriated by another class.
The merchant created the industrialist.
The chronological inconsistencies are perhaps most clearly exemplified by the writings of Nicole Oresme. In his Traictie de la Premierere Invention des Monnies, written about 1360, he develops a theory of money which reveals a very different approach to economic problems from that of his fellow Churchmen.
One thing which is striking in Malthus's theory is his insistence on contradictions and conflicts in the capitalist system. The system is shown not to be self-adjusting. Unless a large class of unproductive consumers was maintained, periodic over-production and stagnation would inevitably occur. For the first time, in English economic theory at any rate, the possibility of crises arising from causes inherent in the capitalist system was admitted.