MPSC 2024 Prelims Paper-I · Question 49 of 100

Correct — option (3), Karlail and Raskin — that is, Thomas Carlyle and John Ruskin, whose names are printed here in an unusual transliteration. The charge in the stem is the Marathi textbook rendering of a nineteenth-century English attack on classical political economy: that the new science had made a god of wealth, Kubera being the keeper and lord of riches in Indian tradition, so that a science organised around the getting of wealth was a science of wealth-worship. Carlyle and Ruskin were the two literary critics who pressed that attack hardest, and neither was an economist. Carlyle, the Scottish essayist and historian, gave political economy the label that has stuck to it ever since when he called it 'the dismal science' in an essay of 1849, and in Past and Present he had already denounced what he called Mammonism and the cash nexus — his term for a society in which the payment of wages had replaced every other bond between people. Ruskin, the art critic, took the argument further in Unto This Last, four essays published in 1860 and issued as a book in 1862, which attacked the political economists' picture of a self-interested economic man and insisted that value could not be separated from the human life it sustained; its most quoted line is that there is no wealth but life. The two are cited together because their objection was moral and aesthetic rather than technical: they did not dispute the economists' arithmetic, they denied that a discipline organised around wealth alone could describe a good society. Ruskin's essay has a direct Indian afterlife too, since Gandhi read it in 1904 and paraphrased it into Gujarati as Sarvodaya, the welfare of all.

• (1)Ricardo and Malthus — David Ricardo and Thomas Malthus are the targets of this criticism, not its authors. They are the central figures of the classical political economy that Carlyle and Ruskin were attacking — Ricardo for the theory of rent, comparative advantage and the labour theory of value, Malthus for the argument that population grows faster than subsistence. The choice is genuinely tempting because Malthus is popularly and persistently linked to the phrase 'the dismal science', but that link runs the wrong way: the phrase was coined by Carlyle about economists of their kind, and the gloom it names is the gloom of their conclusions.
• (2)Keneys and Karl Marks — Keynes and Marx — the paper prints 'Keneys and Karl Marks' — were both critics of the economics of their day, which is what makes this the most substantial of the wrong choices, but neither criticised it as wealth-worship. Keynes worked from inside the discipline, arguing in the General Theory that the classical account of employment was a special case and that output could settle at an equilibrium with mass unemployment; his quarrel was technical. Marx's critique of political economy was that it presented the arrangements of capitalist production as natural and permanent, and that it obscured the extraction of surplus value; his objection was structural and class-based, not a moralist's complaint about the pursuit of riches.
• (4)Chamberlein and Robinsons — Edward Chamberlin and Joan Robinson belong to a completely different debate and a much later one. Both published in 1933 — Chamberlin on monopolistic competition, Robinson on imperfect competition — and their shared achievement was to break the rigid textbook division between perfect competition and monopoly by describing the intermediate market forms in which most firms actually operate, with product differentiation, advertising and downward-sloping demand curves for individual sellers. That is refinement of price theory from within, the opposite of a moral rejection of economics as a wealth-worshipping science.

Classical political economy, as it stood in the middle of the nineteenth century, described the economy as a mechanism driven by self-interested individuals seeking gain, and derived from that description laws of wages, rent and population that appeared to leave little room for moral choice. The reaction against it in Britain came largely from writers outside the discipline, and it took two distinct forms. One was the socialist critique, which accepted that economics described the system accurately and objected to the system. The other was the literary and moral critique of Carlyle and Ruskin, which objected to the description itself: they held that treating human beings as maximisers of wealth was not a simplification but a falsification, that the cash payment could not be the sole nexus between people, and that a science built on that assumption would produce a society organised around the worship of riches. Ruskin's contribution was to insist that wealth means nothing except in relation to the life it makes possible, and that a nation's real accounting must include the condition of the people who produce its goods. This tradition matters in an Indian syllabus because it reached India directly — through Gandhi's reading of Ruskin and his reworking of it as Sarvodaya — and became one of the sources of the ethical strand in Indian economic thought.

MPSC's economics section regularly opens with a history-of-thought question of this kind, in which a phrase or an epithet has to be matched to the person who produced it, and the wrong choices are always genuine economists whose real work lies elsewhere. What makes such items answerable is knowing the shape of each name's contribution rather than any detail of it: a candidate who can place Ricardo and Malthus as classical economists, Keynes and Marx as systematic critics from within economics and political theory respectively, and Chamberlin and Robinson as price theorists of the 1930s can eliminate three choices without knowing anything about Carlyle at all. The Commission also prints foreign names in transliterations that can be hard to recognise — this question alone gives 'Karlail', 'Raskin', 'Keneys', 'Karl Marks', 'Chamberlein' and 'Robinsons' — so recognition must survive the spelling, and a candidate who reads phonetically rather than literally will lose nothing here.

• Thomas Carlyle, the Scottish essayist and historian, coined the description of political economy as 'the dismal science' in an essay of 1849, and had earlier attacked what he called Mammonism and the cash nexus in Past and Present.
• John Ruskin, the art critic and social thinker, attacked classical political economy in Unto This Last, published as four essays in 1860 and as a book in 1862, arguing that there is no wealth but life.
• The criticism made by both writers was moral rather than technical: they did not dispute the economists' reasoning but denied that a science organised around the pursuit of wealth could describe a good society.
• Gandhi read Unto This Last in 1904 and paraphrased it into Gujarati as Sarvodaya, the welfare of all, which carried Ruskin's argument directly into Indian social and economic thought.
• Ricardo and Malthus are the classical economists this criticism was aimed at, while Chamberlin and Robinson, both publishing in 1933, developed the theory of monopolistic and imperfect competition, a technical refinement within economics.

• Attributing 'the dismal science' to Malthus because his conclusions were gloomy, when the phrase was Carlyle's description of economists of that school
• Assuming that any famous critic of capitalism must be the author of any famous criticism of economics, when Marx's objection was structural and Carlyle's moral
• Failing to recognise a name through an unfamiliar transliteration, when this single question prints six of them
• Confusing criticism of the economy with criticism of the discipline of economics — the two are distinct charges and this stem makes the second

History-of-economic-thought questions in MPSC papers are attribution items: a phrase, an epithet, a book title or a doctrine is given and the person behind it has to be identified, or the pairing is reversed. The recurring cast is small — Smith, Ricardo, Malthus, Mill, Marx, Marshall, Keynes, Robinson, Chamberlin, Myrdal, Schumpeter — and each carries one or two signature associations that are worth learning as a table. Expect the Commission to keep printing these names in non-standard transliteration, and expect at least one wrong choice to be a pair of economists who were the targets rather than the authors of the idea in the stem.

No directly related past PYQ was found.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The description of political economy as 'the dismal science' was coined by which of the following writers ?

  • (a)Thomas Malthus
  • (b)Thomas Carlyle
  • (c)John Stuart Mill
  • (d)David Ricardo

  Answer(b) Thomas Carlyle — the Scottish essayist and historian applied the phrase to political economy in an essay of 1849. It is very commonly misattributed to Malthus because his population argument was the gloomiest conclusion the school produced, but Malthus was among the economists the phrase was aimed at rather than its author.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Gandhi's Gujarati paraphrase Sarvodaya was based on which of the following works ?

  • (a)Ruskin's Unto This Last
  • (b)Tolstoy's The Kingdom of God is Within You
  • (c)Thoreau's Civil Disobedience
  • (d)Carlyle's Past and Present

  Answer(a) Ruskin's Unto This Last — Gandhi read it in 1904 and rendered it into Gujarati as Sarvodaya, the welfare of all, taking from it the ideas that the good of the individual is contained in the good of all and that a life of labour is the life worth living. Tolstoy and Thoreau influenced him deeply on other questions, but Sarvodaya is the Ruskin paraphrase.