- 著者
-
永井 義雄
- 出版者
- The Japanese Society for the History of Economic Thought
- 雑誌
- 経済学史学会年報 (ISSN:04534786)
- 巻号頁・発行日
- vol.38, no.38, pp.52-58, 2000 (Released:2010-08-05)
Studying Robert Owen (1771-1858), an utopian socialist, was the starting point of my research activity in 1954 and later, on the basis of my studies of Owen, I extended my research to include a forerunner of the Scottish Historical School (Robert Wallace), now the so-called Scottish Enlightenment, the eighteenth century Lockian radicalism (Price, Priestley and Cartwright), and the nineteenth century Philosophic Radicalism (Bentham). Rivalry of the East and the West for nearly half a century and splits of Marxism were the main causes of regulating my point of view, leading me to take an a-political academic approach toward the historical studies, which made it possible for me to stress the significance of utopian socialism and utilitarianism, both of which have long been despised and neglected by the Marxists. The so-called utopian socialism could not be called utopian, for it was the quite practical scheme for putting into practice co-operative communities all over the world, the first of which was the New Harmony experiment. My point was that Owen's theory was destined to fail on account of its incomplete theory of re-production, though his ideas of co-operation and harmony should still be held in high estimation. Utilitarianism, misunderstood by Marx as just an egoism, on the other hand, was practically the philosophy and an integrated system of jurisprudence that included civil, penal, finance and economic principles of legislation, which included an embryo of the welfare policies in the market system. Bentham was more eager to make minimum the duties of the state than Smith was, and even more earnest in making a safety net for the defeated in the system of free competition. Owen was a follower of Bentham in the idea of the greatest happiness principle.