POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY 319 



tyrannicide, the divine rights of kings, popular rights of resistance 

 to political oppression, and especially the right of the church to 

 determine when subjects should be released from their oaths of 

 allegiance and obedience to their political sovereigns. 



Political Philosophy and Political Economy 



The use of the term " political " in the titles of each of these 

 departments of thought indicates a more intimate relation between 

 the two than actually exists. Voltaire is reported to have said that 

 the Holy Roman Empire was neither holy, nor Roman, nor an 

 empire. With equal truth it might be said that political economy, 

 at least as the science is now conceived, is neither political nor eco- 

 nomic in the ordinary sense of the word. When economic specula- 

 tions first began to assume a form sufficiently coherent and consid- 

 erable to warrant their being grouped under a distinct title and to 

 receive treatment as a separate department of human inquiry, they 

 were essentially cameralistic in character; that is to say, they cen- 

 tered around the problems of public finance. They had to do pri- 

 marily with the questions of maintaining the public credit, and of 

 securing to the state an income adequate for its needs. Thus, at the 

 hands of the first real school of economists, the mercantilists, its 

 relation to practical politics was so intimate that the new science 

 did deserve the title " political economy." By the physiocrats the 

 center of interest was taken from the state and placed in the citizen, 

 the problems surrounding the production of wealth by the individual 

 being the ones especially emphasized. At the same time, however, 

 that the direct dependence of economics upon considerations of 

 political polity was thus lessened, the relation between the philosophic 

 bases of economic and political speculations was rendered more 

 intimate by the founding of economic views upon those same doc- 

 trines of natural laws and inalienable individual rights which were 

 at that time current in political thought. 



In the epoch-making work of Adam Smith, An Enquiry into the 

 Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, the science of political 

 economy assumed more nearly its modern form, but doctrines of 

 natural rights still played a considerable part in its theory. Fur- 

 thermore, as the title partly indicates, questions of political policy 

 were everywhere emphasized. Since Smith's day, however, the 

 uniform tendency among economists has been to consider as the 

 primary purpose of their science the investigation of the production, 

 distribution, and consumption of wealth; and questions of public 

 policy are held to have a place in their inquiries only in so far as they 

 introduce modifying conditions. This fact is shown by the general 

 tendency of the economists of to-day to discard altogether the use of 



