ABSTRACT OF PAPER
Title: “Gulliver’s Rakish Refusal to Identify Himself as a Physician, and the Making of the English Middle Class: A Reconsideration of Adam Smith and Karl Marx on Class, Wealth Creation, and Justice”
Author: miller cecilia Miller
This paper will use Jonathan Swift’s 1726 novel, Gulliver’s Travels, as a test case in an analysis of Adam Smith and Karl Marx on class, wealth creation, and justice. This work of fiction, written decades before Smith, and more than a century before Marx, nevertheless foreshadows the later two thinkers on these exact subjects. Swift’s work is usually, and rightly, discussed in terms of the history of scientific thought. Yet it also has clear ramifications for the development of economic thought. Indeed, although pre-Smithian and pre-Marxist, Gulliver’s Travels was published during the time when Bernard Mandeville’s highly-contentious work The Fable of the Bees (1714, 1732)—which was attacked with fervor by the philosophes, especially Rousseau—with its insistence of the economic necessity of the luxury spending of the super rich for economic growth in the national economy overall, was receiving a remarkable amount of public attention. This talk will attempt to distill some small, but new, understanding of justice in the work of Swift, Smith, and Marx by means of a study of all three authors in terms of the history of economic thought.
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