Laissez Faire and State Intervention in Nineteenth-Century Britain

Seven or eight years ago our Association and its common-law bride, the Committee for Research in Economic History, earnestly set about producing offspring. One cluster of them, it was expected, would look like examples of laissez faire in the United States. In 1943 we inspected these infants in the form of four papers read at our annual meeting; more recently they have been maturing into books. And now we are obliged to acknowledge that they have disappointed the anticipations of their parents by looking rather more like state intervention than like laissez faire. The announcement of Louis Hartz's study, Economic Policy and Democratic Thought: Pennsylvania, 1774-–1860, is not untypical of the comments on all of them which have been consistently made by relatives, friends, and scholarly reviewers. That announcement says: “Through his critical appraisal of Pennsylvania, a leading state in the formative years of the Republic, Mr. Hartz advances the perhaps startling thesis that the contemporary theory of laissez-faire’ actually embraced a vigorous concept of state economic responsibility.”