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Classical political economy in Great Britain was broadly supportive of education, but limited government's role to modest assistance for charitable schools. The early classical economists in the United States, men like Thomas Cooper and Francis Wayland, in addition to supporting free trade, took this classical position with respect to education. But a more aggressive democratic claim was being advanced by the American common school movement and its supporters among Whig protectionists. The early economic tracts of William Jennison, Willard Phillips, Calvin Colton, and Henry Carey envisioned a larger role for government and advocated support for publicly financed common schools. Most notably, the leader of the common school movement, Horace Mann, built a defense for public financing based on a radical theory of property, derived from distinctly Puritan economic doctrine. If his radical positions received little support from post-Civil War mainstream economists, Mann's practical advocacy of public taxation for public schools very much carried the day.

The study of luck in moral and political philosophy has generated two camps: the ``luck egalitarians,'' who see justice as demanding aggressive efforts to reduce inequalities produced by luck broadly conceived, and the advocates of ``democratic equality,'' who emphasize traditional liberal political values. Most of this literature has been ahistorical and hostile to utilitarianism. This essay aims at repositioning the luck debates in the context of John Stuart Mill's oft maligned essay, Utilitarianism. There, Mill posits that the historical progress of justice works against all types of social expediency, thus reducing the role of luck in human affairs. Over time, justice requires a move from ``democratic equality'' to the achievement of ``luck egalitarianism.'' Rather than viewing these as competing approaches to justice, this reading of Mill views them as succeeding stages in the conquest of poverty and the historical achievement of justice. These themes in Utilitarianism also go far toward reconciling that essay with Mill's utilitarian roots.

Why did classical utilitarian thinkers offer only a thin defense of the institution of private property? Utilitarians might have viewed such a defense as irrelevant, trivial, or impossible. A fourth hypothesis holds that utilitarians were ambivalent about the institution, itself. The utilitarians are clear on the relevance of a defense. Triviality would have to be based on 18th century philosophers and historians. Impossibility would raise serious questions about the utilitarian project. Ambivalence seems the most plausible explanation. Utilitarian writings throw considerable doubt on their own commitment to the strongest versions of the defense of private property.

Abstract.  Sandra Peart and David Levy in The "Vanity of the Philosopher" champion a concept of "analytical egalitarianism." Equality is a difficult concept. Peart and Levy attempt to reconstruct analytical egalitarianism from the classical writing of British political economy from Adam Smith to John Stuart Mill. Aspects of this reconstruction touch on a number of different egalitarian conceptions, including: (1) equality of capacity and talent, (2) racial equality, (3) equality in the marketplace, (4) equality of opportunity, (5) equality of material conditions, (6) equality of happiness, (7) equality before God, and (8) political equality. This paper briefly considers the relation of each of these equalities to Peart and Levy's analytical egalitarianism. The hope is that such exercises can help elucidate Peart and Levy's reinterpretation of classical economic's understanding of equality. A central theme does emerge. Peart and Levy, echoing the classical economists themselves, seem reluctant to follow their radical assumptions concerning talent and capacity for happiness to radical conclusions concerning the appropriate provenance of redistributional policies.

Abstract.  This brief survey begins with a suggested procedure for determining whether a given economist viewed a particular goal as an economic or noneconomic objective. Roughly speaking, the approach rests on whether that economist attempted a serious analysis of the tradeoffs between the goal in question and some measure of value. In this view, noneconomic objectives, for any school, include all those objectives that, while recognized as potentially legitimate, are not analyzed in terms of commensurable value measures. Three points to notice about the definition: (1) For any economist, economic objectives should be distinguished from a class of intermediate goods valued largely for their predicted positive impact on production; (2) Some objectives may be altogether dismissed by a school, either as beyond the expertise of economic analysis or as downright harmful; (3) Simply acknowledging the existence of a "cost" to achieving a goal leaves that goal as noneconomic since no attempt at valuation has been made.The paper goes on to sketch three viewpoints toward income equality—that of the classical school as summarized in the work of J. S. Mill, that of the early neoclassicists as represented by Marshall and Pigou, and that of the "new welfare economics" as developed by Kaldor and Hicks. The classical economists valued the relief of poverty, but explicitly attacked anything but the most basic redistributional efforts because of expected dire effects on production. The early neoclassicists built equality implicitly into a utilitarian social welfare function. The "new welfare economics" doubted economists' ability to assess the value of equality, although perhaps not their ability to measure its opportunity cost. Thus the basic argument: both the classicists and the early neoclassicists saw equality as an economic objective, while the new welfare economics was largely built on denying this status to equality.

With the coming of marginal utility theory, the economists of the late nineteenth century were left with a theory of exchange values, but not with a theory of value. For example, William Stanley Jevons suggested that the concept of value be dropped from economics, leaving behind only vectors of exchange ratios (Jevons 1879). Not a few general equilibrium economists today hold much the same view. However, then, as today, there were seemingly fundamental economic questions that required a more general concept of value. Whenever economists turned to describing the movements in the economy over time or comparing the economies of different countries, they inevitably wanted to make statements about changes or differences in the real value of goods.