Ideology and Theory: The Tension Between Political and Economic Liberalism in Seventeenth-Century England

Abstract

DURING THE LAST TWO DECADES of the seventeenth century-ninety years before the Wealth of Nations appeared-a number of British writers challenged the central premises of the balance-of-trade theory for economic growth. The currency crisis and the craze over Indian cottons had sharpened a sense of conflicting interests among Englishmen, and these divisive issues called forth a body of writing which attacked the principles underlying the mercantile system. Examining in a new way the operation of the market, Dudley North, Nicholas Barbon, Dalby Thomas, Henry Martyn, Francis Gardner, James Hodges, Henry Layton, John Houghton, and several anonymous pamphleteers produced explanations of economic relations which were far more sophisticated than the prevailing theories, anticipating at many points the premises of Adam Smith's monumental synthesis. Yet despite this new plateau in economic reasoning, the conceptually flawed balance-of-trade theory, with its built-in corollary that economic regulation was essential to national security, became even more firmly fixed in the public mind in the eighteenth century. The ideological implications of the rejection of these writings have not been explored. Scholars have assumed the science of economics had to wait for the path-breaking geniuses1 or that the balance-of-trade critics were too exceptional to treat as a significant group.2 Charles Wilson recently described Dudley North as a swallow who did not produce a summer.3 The analogy is worth pursuing. Taking a closer look at the birds in hand, it is possible to conclude that it was not the lack of swallows that counted, but the distaste for summers, that, in fact, economic thought ran ahead of social developments, and the analytical insights of the

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