In attempting to fit a phase of the American Revolutionary era into this program on economic unrest, I am not concerned with the factors leading up to the conflict. Historians have traced these in the evolution of the colonies, in changes in Great Britain and, for that matter, in much of Europe, over the long years of peace as well as in the era of controversy. They are complex factors in which thought, whether social, political, or economic, may be far removed from the action that it influences. My concern is with the economic setting in Pennsylvania at the end of the decade of protest and with the rapid changes in price relationships in the early war years which made for unrest within a period of unrest.

I Take it that what lies in the back of the minds of most of us when a subject like this comes up is the problem of the relation between economic unrest and political and social change, and more especially, the kind of change we call a revolution. We all know those for whom the solution of this problem is very simple: they say “look for the economic motive” as innocently as if they said “cherchez la femme.” Even at a more mature level of thinking the problem is still often put in such a way that something economic always lies at the bottom, or pulls the trigger, or provides the main impulse, or—and this is the precious word—“determines” everything.

In looking back over a hundred years to John Stuart Mill's Principles of Political Economy and to the Communist Manifesto, joint product of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, it is difficult not to be influenced by the stereotypes of “bourgeois” and “Marxian” economists that have developed in the process of doctrinal controversy. (It is sometimes as difficult to recognize the “orthodox” economist from the description of the “Marxian” as it is to recognize the “classical” economist from the description of the “Keynesian.”) But the difficulty does not lie simply in the probability that adherents of each school will caricature the leaders of the other, emphasizing contrasts; there is an equal probability that the modern adherents of each school will caricature their founders, emphasizing points that have come to be important. The “historical” Marx and Mill have to be sought with the special care that arises from an awareness of these difficulties.

The economic distress and the new concern with social problems in England in the 1840's, which underlay the reformulations of political economy in that decade, had also an extensive and significant reflection in imaginative literature. While the novel with a thesis, even a social thesis, was nothing new, it was only in the forties that English literature began to deal on a major scale with the social problems raised by the industrial revolution. One can sense in the novels of this decade an increased urgency and pressure, a more daring and direct attack. This emphasis is so marked that one critic has attempted a correlation between literature and socialism, and has sought to find in the novels of Dickens the same type of social observation and emotional reaction that prompted the analyses of Karl Marx. While such a thesis goes too far and is almost certainly invalid, one can nevertheless find in these novels a historical meaning of a different sort, more complex, but also more interesting and suggestive to the historian.

Seven or eight years ago our Association and its common-law bride, the Committee for Research in Economic History, earnestly set about producing offspring. One cluster of them, it was expected, would look like examples of laissez faire in the United States. In 1943 we inspected these infants in the form of four papers read at our annual meeting; more recently they have been maturing into books. And now we are obliged to acknowledge that they have disappointed the anticipations of their parents by looking rather more like state intervention than like laissez faire. The announcement of Louis Hartz's study, Economic Policy and Democratic Thought: Pennsylvania, 1774-–1860, is not untypical of the comments on all of them which have been consistently made by relatives, friends, and scholarly reviewers. That announcement says: “Through his critical appraisal of Pennsylvania, a leading state in the formative years of the Republic, Mr. Hartz advances the perhaps startling thesis that the contemporary theory of laissez-faire’ actually embraced a vigorous concept of state economic responsibility.”

On December 11, 1847, the Journal des chemins de fer, founded and edited in Paris since 1842 by an Englishman, declared that the French rentes had fallen as much as if the government was about to be overthrown. The King, who was ill in body at the time, yet perfectly comfortable in mind, recovered, but on February 24, 1848, he and his government fell in a revolution that was as sudden and dramatic as it was triumphant. Among its leaders were Socialists, like Louis Blanc, who controlled a considerable body of workingmen, some of whom belonged to the building trades and the domestic industries of the capital, while others had been brought to Paris some years before to work on the fortifications. They were moved first to the barricades; then, after being victorious there, to the national workshops organized by Louis Blanc, now a member of the provisional government, who had proclaimed on behalf of the workingmen the “right to work,” as the most important organ of the workingmen, L'Atelier, had proclaimed the limitation of hours, the right to organize, and a minimum wage. These demands seem reasonable to us now, but they were thought dangerous then, not only by a majority of the provisional government, but also by the majority of the new legislature and of the French people.

When a given population is able to produce more goods and more services than are required for its subsistence, the concentration of an economic surplus becomes possible. Such concentration has always involved the formation of a class structure. Part of the population performs the physical labor of economic production; it becomes the working class. Other segments of the population performing services other than physical labor receive portions of the economic surplus. They become the possessing and, usually, the ruling classes.

It is unnecessary to insist on the differences between the communism of Plato's political writings and the modern political systems and theories of the same name. Politically, economically, and geographically the world of Marx and his followers is different from that of Greece in the fourth century b.c., and even modern Utopias are founded on modern technology.