Visions on the Commercial Civilization in Nineteenth Century Britain : Interactions between Some Trends in Economic Thought

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This research program explores how many trends of British social and economic thoughts affected each other in the first half of nineteenth century.First of my central investigation lies in the social thought of Thomas Carlyle especially in his essay of 'Characteristics' (1831). Carlyle explains the typical character of the 'age of mechaics' as the condition that the wholeness and unity of human beings had lost. In his argument, the selfconsciousness does not mean a disease in itself, but the critical situation of the diversity between the objects and consciousness does mean the sign and symptom of the diseased age of modern. His argument was in fact closely connected with the German tradition of Romanticism and Carlyle's 'Characteristics' derived some ideas from the argument of German writers especially F.Schlegel.Secondly, I made some research on J.S.Mill's ethical and political judgment on the contemporary commercial society. In 1835 Mill rejected Tocqueville's judgment that the condition of American society contains the danger of democracy and forecasts the future possibility of European society. But in the essay on 'Civilization' (1836), Mill recognized the resemblance of the social conditions between UK and US especially in the point that the middle class is becoming dominant in both countries. Mill's argument in his second review article on Tocqueville (1840) is common with nowadays some arguments on the ambivalence of the 'Modernity'.