As a coherent economic theory, classical economics start with Smith, continues with the British Economists Thomas Robert Malthus and David Ricardo. Although differences of opinion were numerous among the classical economists in the time span between Smith's Wealth of Nations and Ricardo's Principles of Political Economy and Taxation, they all mainly agreed on major principles. All believed in private property, free markets, and, in Smith's words, " The individual pursuit of private gain to increase the public good." They shared Smith's strong suspicion of government and his enthusiastic confidence in the power of self-interest represented by his famous "invisible hand," which reconciled public benefit with personal quest of private gain. From Ricardo, classicists derived the notion of diminishing returns, which held that as more labor and capital were applied to land yields after a certain and not very advanced stage in the progress of agriculture steadily diminished.

The central thesis of The Wealth of Nation

"David Ricardo" by G. de Vivo from New Palgrave, 1987, at Univ. Marburge (PDF Version)

Saint-Simon was a son of the great French Revolution. Born a nobleman, he was precocious for his society's day and age. He believed that technology was the key to the future, without service and technology society would not be able to flourish. Simone understood that industrialization was the key to higher living. Unlike his classical economic counterparts, Simone opposed the exploitation of nature, but especially of man.

He was the first to declare that in any given society the degree of woman's emancipation is the natural measure of the general emancipation. He proves "that the civilized stage raises every vice practiced by barbarism in a simple fashion into a form of existence, complex, ambiguous, equivocal, hypocritical" -- that civilization moves "in a vicious circle", in contradictions which it constantly reproduces without being able to solve them. This is how he constantly arrives at the very opposite to that which he wants to attain, or pretends to want to attain, "under civilization poverty is born of superabundance itself".

The British Economists by John Shield Nicholson, 1907.

.He confronts the material and moral misery of the bourgeois world with the earlier philosophers' promises of a society in which reason alone should reign, of a civilization in which happiness should be universal, of an endless human perfectibility, and the phraseology of the bourgeois ideologists of his time. He depicts, with equal power and charm, the shop-keeping spirit prevalent in, and characteristic of, French commerce at that time. The ideal harmonious state of his Brook Farm experiment, a phalanstery south of Boston attracted little attention.

The last of the French utopian socialists, by the name of Louis Blanqui believed in natural workshops and the idea of the government standing as an employment agency.

The only escape from over-population and the horrors of the so-called, "positive check" was in voluntary limitation of population, not by contraception, rejected on religious grounds by Malthus, but by late marriage and, consequently smaller families. These pessimistic doctrines of classical economists earned for economics the nature of the "dismal science".

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