From propaganda to dogma

By the end of the eighteenth century, laissez-faire had triumphed in Western Europe and the United States of America. Capitalists now had political power with which to defend and promote their wealth. It is true that the break with feudalism and monarchy had not been a clean one and that, in varying degrees, kings and landlords still had the power to impede and irritate those bent on the accumulation of fortunes from industry and trade. But before the kings and lords had laid down their arms and joined their victors, a new threat had arisen. Capitalism, it appeared, was not welcomed with universal delight despite the blessings the economists predicted it would bring, and there were those who regarded it as so little of a blessing as to want to get rid of it and replace it by some or other system based on equality and the brotherhood of man. Economics was now consolidated into a set of dogmas which, in Pigou’s words, ‘furnished forth for the ungodly blunt instruments with which to bludgeon at birth useful projects of social betterment.’1