Principles of Political EconomyJohn Stuart Mill
About Principles of Political Economy
Mill published the in 1848, the same year as Marx's Communist Manifesto. The two works share a subject but almost nothing else. Mill's treatise is a systematic exposition of classical economics in the tradition of Adam Smith and David Ricardo, but with a moral and social ambition that neither predecessor attempted.
The first two books cover production and distribution. Mill accepts the Ricardian framework for value, rent, and wages, but insists on a distinction that transforms its implications: the laws of production are facts of nature, but the laws of distribution are matters of human institution. Society can choose how to distribute what it produces. This distinction opens space for reform without revolution.
Books III and IV treat exchange, money, and international trade. Book V addresses the role of government, and here Mill's liberalism shows its range. He defends free trade and competition as general principles but acknowledges extensive exceptions: education, public works, poor relief, regulation of monopolies. The "stationary state," in which economic growth levels off, is not a catastrophe but an opportunity to turn human energy from accumulation toward culture, leisure, and the improvement of the art of living.
The work went through seven editions in Mill's lifetime and served as the standard economics textbook in Britain for a generation.