In Search of the Origins of Value

Paul Stephens, University of York

Britain’s economic revolution during the long eighteenth century was a suitable occasion to review the origins of economic value. As capital and labour commenced their slow move from the fields to the factories, it seemed wise to keep tabs on how goods acquired value. This could enable landowners and capitalists to maximise their incomes from rent and profit: locating the spring of the nation’s growing wealth could help steer investment and augment returns. It also aided the political orchestration of the economy itself, with new legislation encouraging commercial expansion in key sectors. Finally, it foregrounded the welfare of those who actually made things. If labour was essential to production, then maybe this should be reflected in generous wage rates that enabled workers to purchase vital goods and endure the cost of living.

Such questions were central to the emerging discipline of political economy. The discipline offered the first systematic accounts of production, distribution, and exchange in the modern world, demonstrating how labour (and how it was organised) was central to growth. In The Wealth of Nations (1776; 1.56–63), Adam Smith clarified the origins of value by considering hunters in the early stages of society. If ‘it usually costs twice the labour to kill a beaver which it does to kill a deer,’ he suggests, ‘one beaver should naturally exchange for or be worth two deer.’ Moreover, the value now embodied in each good was measurable and regulated by the quantity of labour each good commanded in exchange.

This was the essential idea of Smith’s labour theory of value. But these ‘natural’ laws of exchange were distorted by the emergence of private property. In the modern economy, each worker now surrendered some of the value they generated to those who had ‘accumulated’ land and ‘stock’, or who supplied workers they ‘employ’ with ‘materials’ to produce goods. Thus, ‘the price or exchangeable value’ of goods was now dispersed in the tripartite form of wages, rent, and profit. These complexities were compounded by something called money, an imperfect representative of the real measure of value (commandable labour), and by the price-determining forces of supply and demand, which regulated the circulation of value across the social world.

Smith’s arguments influenced writers throughout the early nineteenth century who sought to understand Britain’s industrialising economy. For some, however, the dense connections between natural and monetary forms of value merely obfuscated simpler moral truths. If labour was the sole origin of value, for instance, then why did workers share so much of it with wealthy landlords and capitalists, some of whom gave the impression of doing little work at all? Perhaps they shouldn’t?

Such awkward questions were seized upon by various radical factions during the 1790s, as Britain watched events unfold in France. In the second edition of his Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1796; 2.428), William Godwin suggests that ‘[there] is scarcely any species of wealth, expenditure or splendour existing in any civilized country, that is not in some way produced by the express manual labour … of the inhabitants of that country.’ The redistributive implications of this claim played a key role in Godwin’s austere philosophical anarchism and optimistic evocations of perfected future societies. But it must have alarmed some of his cultivated early readers—those who could afford the expensive first editions of the tract but had never tilled the fields or descended a mine.

Comparable ideas were also voiced by those addressing the labouring class directly. William Cobbett often cited the labour theory of value in his weekly Political Register during Britain’s years of war with France. The theory lent his rabid censure of the government’s monetary and martial policies a compelling moral force. Such ideas recured in ‘To The Journeymen and Labourers of England, Wales, Scotland, and Ireland’ (1816), published as a cheap 2d. pamphlet which sold 200,000 copies within a year. Cobbett opened by declaiming that ‘the real strength and all the resources of a country, ever have sprung and ever must spring, from the labour of its people.’ He was not alone. In ‘Address to the People’ (1816), Joseph Mitchell asked why, ‘amidst the abundant sweets of the earth, the poor wretched labourer is struggling with all his industry’. And in his inaugural editorial for the ultra-radical Medusa: or, Penny Politician (1819), Thomas Davison fumed that ‘the great Treasury of the Nation … is accumulated from hard labour,’ not from ‘the Statesmen at Whitehall, the Judges on the Bench,’ nor ‘the Parish officers.’ During the gruelling post-Waterloo recession, such claims were playing with revolutionary fire.

It was the ethical dimension of the labour theory of value that most appealed to the poets of the age. Augmenting the rational analyses of economists, philosophers, and pamphleteers, they explored the affective responses to the iniquities experienced (or at least witnessed) by their assumed audiences. Poetry was a suitable vehicle for a different kind of economic knowledge. It could stimulate the imaginations of readers and help them to envision—and thus help them to engender—improved social worlds. Poetry addressed itself to the heart as much as the head, giving complicated economic theories an intuitive resonance.

The greatest poet to articulate these ideas was Percy Bysshe Shelley. During his short life, Shelley embraced the labour theory of value in several poems and essays to defend the claims of the poor. Queen Mab; A Philosophical Poem; With Notes (1813; 5.113–20) outlines the impact of exploitation on ‘the poor man,’

Whose life is misery, and fear and care;
Whom the morn wakens but to fruitless toil;
Who ever hears his famished offspring’s scream;
Whom their pale mother’s uncomplaining gaze
Forever meets, and the proud rich man’s eye
Flashing command, and the heart-breaking scene
Of thousands like himself.

The stanza in which these lines appear is linked to a prose note that opens by identifying the origins of value and wealth. ‘There is no real wealth but the labour of man,’ Shelley explains; ‘[were] the mountains of gold and the vallies of silver, the world would not be one grain of corn the richer; no one comfort would be added to the human race.’ Labour is seen as the bedrock of all forms of human society, commercial or otherwise. This compounds the poem’s censure of political tyranny, the monarchy, and the church, the unjust beneficiaries of other people’s hard work. In a perfected future society these institutions would simply not exist, and labour would retain and share the value it produced.

If the orthodox labour theory of value gave economic credibility to radical arguments, then Queen Mab soon gave literary credibility to the verse of ultra-radical poets who echoed its content and style. The poem, in brief, became the origin of a poetic value that served as a channel for revolutionary ideas during the ‘heroic age of popular radicalism’ (1816­–20).

One early indication of the poem’s value was its glowing reception in the Theological Inquirer, a freethinking journal edited by George Cannon (as ‘Erasmus Perkins’) that appeared monthly between March and September 1815. The journal’s literary critic, the shoemaker Robert C. Fair (‘F’), reviewed Queen Mab across several issues, praising its philosophical acuity. Fair also penned several poems of his own. The longest was The Ruined City (1815), a visionary ruins poem in 546 lines of uneven heroic verse, in which a fictitious empire, Delma, foreshadows the anticipated downfall of Britain. Like Shelley, Fair suggests that the expropriation of labour is a crucial factor in social decline:

Improvement dies, the fields remain untill’d,
Nor flowers, nor fruit the wasted gardens yield;
For who would basely toil, when from his hand
The earned reward a tyrant can command?
The peasant goes (at home no longer free)
To distant climes in search of liberty. (ll.461-66)

There is some evidence that Shelley collaborated with Cannon on the Theological Inquirer and echoed imagery from The Ruined City in poems such as ‘Ozymandias’ (1818). Yet Fair diverged from Shelley on the question of the origins of value. Like Cannon, Fair had links to the Society of Spencean Philanthropists, a London-based ultra-radical group established in 1814 to promote the communitarian ideas of the recently deceased Thomas Spence. For the Spenceans, value did not ultimately originate in labour, but in land and natural resources. ‘The Address and Regulations of the Society of Spencean Philanthropists’ (1815) thus explained that ‘the productions of the earth and water’ should be redistributed ‘equally for the use of all’ in accordance with the equality of persons as ‘nature intended’. Their envisioned ‘people’s Farm’ thus reunited labour with the value it produced with recourse to a land theory of value and common access to natural resources.

This vision of harmonious equality between labour and land was pushed by later Spencean poets such as the hairdresser Edward Joseph Blandford  (‘E. J. B.’), whose verse appeared in the Medusa. ‘Primitive Times; Or, Wholesome Advice for a Plundered People’ portrays a lost age in which ‘LABOUR its full honest wages had / For then in idle sloth, no tyrants fed,’ whilst ‘The True Believer’s Creed!!!’ questions ‘what’s more a MAN’S OWN than the work of his hand?’ His best effort was ‘A REAL DREAM; Or, Another Hint for Mr. Bull!’ (1819), a dream vision in heroic verse that contrasts the conditions of England with the imagined idyll of Spence’s Land Plan (lines 21–26):

Where equal toil the fertile soil prepar’d,
And all the equal gain of produce shar’d;
Where old and young an equal balance held,
And each with fruits an equal measure fill’d;
Where each had equal space for his abode,
With nature’s equal laws their only code.

Blandford hoped his verse might spur readers to work towards improving the conditions of the present. Like Shelley, he was a man of action. He had already helped to co-organise the notorious Spa Fields meetings in December 1816, a response to the distresses caused by inequality during the post Waterloo recession. But he lacked the great poet’s restraint. The month following the publication of ‘A REAL DREAM’, he was arrested for possessing a pike spear and gunpowder, and was fortunate to escape the later fate of his associates in the Cato Street Conspiracy (1820). Persuading others of the egalitarian implications of the land theory of value remained a challenge for the Spenceans, and so it remains.

The search for the origins of economic value during the long eighteenth century was focused on the role of labour and natural resources in the generation of goods. Britain’s economists examined the obscure dynamics that circulated this value across society. In doing so, they influenced the political legislation of economic activity. The poets saw value as originating in our capacity to perceive what is valuable. And they were prescient in doing so. The later marginalist utility theories that took shape in the mid-nineteenth century repositioned value as originating, not in factors of production such as labour or land, but in consumer desires. This became the new orthodoxy. The poets who sought to shape imaginative desires in order to shape economic change were thus onto something, generating images of worlds haunting, compelling, and new.

Support received from the Leverhulme Trust, with thanks.

Further Reading

• Peter C. Dooley, The Labour Theory of Value (Routledge, 2005)
• J. Ann Hone, For the Cause of Truth: Radicalism in London 1796-1821 (Clarendon, 1982)
• Michael Henry Scrivener, Poetry and Reform: Periodical Verse from the English Democratic Press, 1792–1824 (Wayne State UP, 1992)
• Paul Stephens, ‘Queen Mab and the Origins of Economic Value,’ Romanticism 30:1 (2024), 68–80
• E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (Penguin, 2013)