Menu Expand

John Stuart Mill, Virtues and the Laboring Classes, with Notes on McCloskey

Cite JOURNAL ARTICLE

Style

Persky, J. John Stuart Mill, Virtues and the Laboring Classes, with Notes on McCloskey. Journal of Contextual Economics – Schmollers Jahrbuch, 140(3–4), 341-353. https://doi.org/10.3790/schm.140.3-4.341
Persky, Joseph "John Stuart Mill, Virtues and the Laboring Classes, with Notes on McCloskey" Journal of Contextual Economics – Schmollers Jahrbuch 140.3–4, 2020, 341-353. https://doi.org/10.3790/schm.140.3-4.341
Persky, Joseph (2020): John Stuart Mill, Virtues and the Laboring Classes, with Notes on McCloskey, in: Journal of Contextual Economics – Schmollers Jahrbuch, vol. 140, iss. 3–4, 341-353, [online] https://doi.org/10.3790/schm.140.3-4.341

Format

John Stuart Mill, Virtues and the Laboring Classes, with Notes on McCloskey

Persky, Joseph

Journal of Contextual Economics – Schmollers Jahrbuch, Vol. 140 (2020), Iss. 3–4 : pp. 341–353

Additional Information

Article Details

Author Details

Joseph Persky, Department of Economics, University of Illinois Chicago, 601 S. Morgan St., Chicago, IL 60607, United States.

References

  1. Anderson, E. 2017. Private Government: How Employers Rule Our Lives. Princeton: Princeton University Press.  Google Scholar
  2. Bowles, S. and H. Gintis. 1993. “A Political and Economic Case for Democratic Enterprise.” Economics and Philosophy 9 (1): 75 – 100.  Google Scholar
  3. Carlisle, J. 1991. John Stuart Mill and the Writing of Character. Athens: University of Georgia.  Google Scholar
  4. Cohen, G. A. 1995. Self-Ownership, Freedom, and Equality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.  Google Scholar
  5. Donner, W. 1991. The Liberal Self: John Stuart Mill’s Moral and Political Philosophy. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.  Google Scholar
  6. Dow, G. K. 2003. Governing the Firm: Workers’ Control in Theory and Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.  Google Scholar
  7. Hutt, W. H. 1940. “The Concept of Consumers’ Sovereignty.” Economic Journal 50 (197): 66 – 77.  Google Scholar
  8. Kurer, O. 1998. “Mill’s Recantation of the Wages-Fund Doctrine: Was Mill Right, after All?” History of Political Economy 30 (3): 515 – 36.  Google Scholar
  9. Marglin, S. A. 1974. “What Do Bosses Do? The Origins and Functions of Hierarchy in Capitalist Production, Part I.” Review of Radical Political Economics 6 (2): 60 – 112.  Google Scholar
  10. McCabe, H. 2019. “Navigating by the North Star: The Role of the ‘Ideal’ in John Stuart Mill’s View of ‘Utopian’ Schemes and the Possibilities of Social Transformation.” Utilitas 31 (3): 291 – 309.  Google Scholar
  11. McCloskey, D. N. 2006. The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.  Google Scholar
  12. McCloskey, D. N. 2010. Bourgeois Dignity: Why Economics Can’t Explain the Modern World. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.  Google Scholar
  13. McCloskey, D. N. 2016. Bourgeois Equality: How Ideas, Not Capital or Institutions, Enriched the World. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.  Google Scholar
  14. Mill, J. S. (1848) 1965. “Principles of Political Economy with Some of Their Applications to Social Philosophy.” In Principles of Political Economy, Vol. 2 – 3 of The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, edited by J. M. Robson. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.  Google Scholar
  15. Mill, J. S. (1861) 1985. “Utilitarianism.” In Essays on Ethics, Religion, and Society, Vol. 10 of The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, edited by J. M. Robson, 203 – 60. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.  Google Scholar
  16. Miller, D. E. 2003. “Mill’s Socialism.” Politics, Philosophy & Economics 2 (2): 213 – 48.  Google Scholar
  17. Nozick, R. (1974) 2013. Anarchy, State, and Utopia. New York: Basic Books.  Google Scholar
  18. Persky, J. 2016. The Political Economy of Progress: John Stuart Mill and Modern Radicalism. New York: Oxford University Press.  Google Scholar
  19. Persky, J. and K. Madden. 2019. “The Economic Content of G. D. H. Cole’s Guild Socialism: Behavioral Assumptions, Institutional Structure, and Analytical Arguments.” European Journal of the History of Economic Thought 26 (3): 427 – 63.  Google Scholar
  20. Shaikh, A. 2016. Capitalism: Competition, Conflict, Crises. New York: Oxford University Press.  Google Scholar
  21. Ziliak, S. 2004. “Self-Reliance Before the Welfare State: Evidence from the Charity Organization Movement in the United States.” The Journal of Economic History 64 (2): 433 – 61.  Google Scholar

Abstract

Deirdre McCloskey’s work on bourgeois virtues is pathbreaking, but it has relatively little to say about working class virtues. The present paper turns to John Stuart Mill (a McCloskey favorite) for his take on the “future of the laboring classes” (Mill [1848] 1965, 758 – 796). If modern capitalism is the world created by McCloskey’s bourgeois virtues, what would the world created by Mill’s working-class virtues look like? Key to that vision is the emergence of an economy based on producer cooperatives. McCloskey is undoubtedly right that the bourgeoisie has greatly improved the material conditions of the mass of workers, but those workers have been left viewing the larger portion of their lives as instrumental. The major workday virtue of the modern worker remains temperance/discipline. Mill and his wife, Harriet Taylor, anticipate cooperatives as generating a much richer work life, a work life that would encourage the development of a range of virtues in the workers themselves. It is clear that Britain (and most of the rest of the world) has not evolved the way that Mill anticipated. To what extent then must we conclude that a widespread sense of virtue has slipped through our hands?