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Subject Area: Economics
Topic: General Treatises on Economics
Collection: Banned Books

Preface to the Third Edition [July, 1852] - John Stuart Mill, Principles of Political Economy with some of their Applications to Social Philosophy (Ashley ed.) [1848]

Edition used:

Principles of Political Economy with some of their Applications to Social Philosophy, ed. William James Ashley (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1909, 7th ed.).

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Liberty Fund, Inc. is a private, educational foundation established to encourage the study of the ideal of a society of free and responsible individuals.


Preface to the Third Edition [July, 1852]

The present edition has been revised throughout, and several chapters either materially added to or entirely re-cast. Among these may be mentioned that on the “Means of abolishing Cottier Tenantry,” the suggestions contained in which had reference exclusively to Ireland, and to Ireland in a condition which has been much modified by subsequent events. An addition has been made to the theory of International Values laid down in the eighteenth chapter of the Third Book.

The chapter on Property has been almost entirely re-written. I was far from intending that the statement which it contained of the objections to the best known Socialist schemes should be understood as a condemnation of Socialism, regarded as an ultimate result of human progress. The only objection to which any great importance will be found to be attached in the present edition is the unprepared state of mankind in general, and of the labouring classes in particular; their extreme unfitness at present for any order of things, which would make any considerable demand on either their intellect or their virtue. It appears to me that the great end of social improvement should be to fit mankind by cultivation for a state of society combining the greatest personal freedom with that just distribution of the fruits of labour which the present laws of property do not profess to aim at. Whether, when this state of mental and moral cultivation shall be attained, individual property in some form (though a form very remote from the present) or community of ownership in the instruments of production and a regulated division of the produce will afford the circumstances most favourable to happiness, and best calculated to bring human nature to its greatest perfection, is a question which must be left, as it safely may, to the people of that time to decide. Those of the present are not competent to decide it.

The chapter on the “Futurity of the Labouring Classes” has been enriched with the results of the experience afforded, since this work was first published, by the co-operative associations in France. That important experience shows that the time is ripe for a larger and more rapid extension of association among labourers than could have been successfully attempted before the calumniated democratic movements in Europe, which, though for the present put down by the pressure of brute force, have scattered widely the seeds of future improvement. I have endeavoured to designate more clearly the tendency of the social transformation, of which these associations are the initial step; and at the same time to disconnect the co-operative cause from the exaggerated or altogether mistaken declamations against competition, so largely indulged in by its supporters.