THE CLASSICALS' ANALYSIS OF CAPITALISM

ANTONINO GIOVANNI CALLARI, University of Massachusetts Amherst

Abstract

This dissertation analyzes the logical structure of Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations and David Ricardo's Principles of Political Economy and Taxation as two of the most important texts of Classical Political Economy. The thesis is that the central concept around which these texts are organized is the concept of "wealth." We analyze how the Classicals' development of the economic categories of money, capital, productive labor, etc. can be understood by reference to this concept of wealth. The analysis is conducted within the perspective of the Althusserian concept of "theoretical practice." This concept of theoretical practice questions the validity of empiricist and/or rationalist understandings of science. It argues that the referents for scientific discourses are to be constructed as a process (processes) of confrontation of knowledges, with political conditions and effects. Accordingly, the analysis of Smith and Ricardo not only investigates the internal logic of their texts but also, and most important, constructs that logic as a political stance. The concept of wealth, around which the logic of the Classicals' texts revolves, is understood below as having political effects. It has such effects because the construction of capitalism as a system of production of wealth provides a condition for the political reproduction of private property relations. Moreover, the internal logic of the classical texts, because of the primacy of the concept of wealth, rests upon and theoretically reconstructs a simultaneously humanist and economistic conception of social relation (this is true not only for Smith but also for Ricardo). It is this combination of humanism and economism that allows the Classicals to theoretically construct capitalism as a socially cohesive system. Smith and Ricardo understood social cohesion to be the tendential result of the system of private property and exchange. Their analysis of market relations reduced money to a mere medium of circulation and the distributional relations of capitalism to the reproduction of the social and material conditions necessitated by the division of labor and the production of social wealth. While Smith's and Ricardo's principal political problem remained the defense of private property, they nevertheless operated in different historical conjunctures. They therefore understood the determinants of social cohesion differently. While Smith's perspective was closer to that of the Age of Enlightenment, Ricardo's partook of the reaction to the Age of Enlightenment represented by the spread of Malthusianism. It is for this reason that Smith and Ricardo adopted two different objects of analysis: the division of labor and the laws of distribution, respectively. It is for this reason that Smith's and Ricardo's analysis of value differed, without however producing a break insofar as the primacy of the concept of wealth and the political defense of private property are concerned. The break with Classical Political Economy is produced by Marx. This break is inaugurated by the primacy of the concept of surplus-value in Marx, and by the subsumption of the concept of wealth to this concept of surplus-value. Marx's different object of analysis is produced by a different articulation of the various economic categories, and implies a structure of the labor theory of value different from the classical labor theory of value. This "break" between Marx and the Classicals is analyzed through the use of Marx's criticisms of the Classicals' development of the categories of analysis as well as of their overall perspective.

Subject Area

Economic history

Recommended Citation

CALLARI, ANTONINO GIOVANNI, "THE CLASSICALS' ANALYSIS OF CAPITALISM" (1981). Doctoral Dissertations Available from Proquest. AAI8117976.
https://scholarworks.umass.edu/dissertations/AAI8117976

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