real utopias

Eclectic political economy failed, however, to give complete faction either to scholars who continued to try to answer the question which previous generations had bequeathed to them or to the bourgeoisie itself, which found itself constantly exposed to the risk that. starting from the popularisation of Ricardo’s ideas. economists might pursue some point in the direction of socialism (as happened with John Stuart Mill). In order to neutralise the “socialist danger”. which was felt with especial keenness after the revolution of 1848, and above all after the Paris Commune (1871), the entire structure based on the labour theory of value had to be demolished. This was the great turning-point of bourgeois political economy, towards the marginal theory of value, which was prepared so early as 1855, independently of each other,” by Hermann Gossen and Richard Jennings. and which culminated in the British (Jevons, 1871), Viennese (Menger, 1871) and Swiss (Walras, 1874) neo-classical schools.