The Socialism of to-day

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Monograph

Identifikator:: 835096955

URN:: urn:nbn:de:zbw-retromon-28834

Document type:: Monograph

Author:: Laveleye, Émile de

Title:: The Socialism of to-day

Place of publication:: London

Publisher:: Field & Tuer

Year of publication:: 1884

Scope:: 1 Online-Ressource (XLIV, 331 S.)

Collection:: Economics Books

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I xlii INTRO D UCTION and only really efficacious incentive to all productive activity, all good economic administration, and, above all, all improve ment. No doubt laws and regulations might modify the conditions under which competition acts, so as to place com petitors more upon an equality, and to effect that, each man possessing the requisites of production, no one should be obliged to accept insufficient wages through fear of starvation. True freedom of contract in that case existing, competition, which is the indispensable mainspring of the economic world, would be freed from the greater part of the disastrous effects now laid to its charge. Ranke, the historian, has shown how Protestantism, by its very attacks upon the Papacy, provoked a reform in the bosom of the Romish Church whereby new life was infused into her. In the same way, the wisest Economists of our time have recog nized that the exaggerated, but often well founded, criticisms passed upon our social system by Socialists, have been the means of producing undoubted progress in Political Economy. Thus Economists used to affirm that our social organization was the result of “natural laws,” and itself constituted “the natural order of things.” It followed, as Cairnes observes, that the well-to-do classes gathered from the writings of the Econo mists the comfortable conviction that the existing world was not far off from perfection, and were thus led to reject without examination any idea of a better organization as chimerical. Nowadays most Economists recognize that everything con cerning the distribution of wealth is the result of laws and customs which have varied at different times, and that, con sequently, a more strict application of justice might introduce a great improvement. Formerly Economists occupied them selves principally with the increase of production, while they merely described the distribution of wealth without examining if it was conformable to justice, and studied labour merely as the natural agent of production. To-day we recognize more and more that the question which overshadows all others is that of distribution, that every problem must be considered, especially in its moral and juridical aspect, and that the just reward of the workman is what is most important when con-

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