IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/oup/oxecpp/v72y2020i4p1050-1071..html
   My bibliography  Save this article

W.H. Hutt and the conceptualization of consumers’ sovereignty

Author

Listed:
  • Maxime Desmarais-Tremblay

Abstract

This article examines the meaning of consumers’ sovereignty in the interwar thought of the economist William Harold Hutt. For Hutt, consumers’ sovereignty was an ideal, a norm against which economists could assess different economic systems. It connected the value of individual freedom, the commitment to a market society and an appeal to a liberal democracy. By coining the expression of consumers’ sovereignty, Hutt operated a creative re-description of the Millian idea of individual sovereignty which reflected the rise of the figure of the consumer in the public space. Hutt’s vision had been forged by the teaching he received at the London School of Economics and his involvement in the Individualist movement in the 1920s.

Suggested Citation

  • Maxime Desmarais-Tremblay, 2020. "W.H. Hutt and the conceptualization of consumers’ sovereignty," Oxford Economic Papers, Oxford University Press, vol. 72(4), pages 1050-1071.
    • Handle: RePEc:oup:oxecpp:v:72:y:2020:i:4:p:1050-1071.
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/oep/gpaa015
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Antoinette Baujard, 2021. "Values in Welfare economics," Working Papers halshs-03244909, HAL.
    2. Guilhem Lecouteux, 2021. "Who's Afraid of Incoherence? Behavioural Welfare Economics and the Sovereignty of the Neoclassical Consumer," GREDEG Working Papers 2021-01, Groupe de REcherche en Droit, Economie, Gestion (GREDEG CNRS), Université Côte d'Azur, France.

    More about this item

    JEL classification:

    • B20 - Schools of Economic Thought and Methodology - - History of Economic Thought since 1925 - - - General
    • P10 - Political Economy and Comparative Economic Systems - - Capitalist Economies - - - General
    • P20 - Political Economy and Comparative Economic Systems - - Socialist and Transition Economies - - - General
    • A12 - General Economics and Teaching - - General Economics - - - Relation of Economics to Other Disciplines

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:oup:oxecpp:v:72:y:2020:i:4:p:1050-1071.. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Oxford University Press (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://academic.oup.com/oep .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.