book, Elements of Political Economy. J. S. Mill spent most of his
life working at the East India Company—his extraordinarily
prolific writing career was conducted entirely as an aside. In
1848 he published his Principles of Political Economy, which
updated the principles found in Adam Smith’s The Wealth of
Nations and which remained the basic textbook for students of
economics until the end of the nineteenth century. In Principles
Mill made an important contribution to the economics
discipline by distinguishing between the economics of
production and of distribution. He pointed out that economic
laws had nothing to do with the distribution of wealth, which
was a societal matter, but had everything to do with
production.
Previous to Mill’s Principles was his System of Logic (1843),
which was the century’s most influential text on logic and the
theory of knowledge. His essays on ethics, contemporary
culture, and freedom of speech, such as Utilitarianism and On
Liberty, are still widely studied today.
Karl Marx (1818–1883)