Laissez-Faire Thought in Pennsylvania, 1776–1860

Louis Hartz

The Journal of Economic History, 1943, vol. 3, issue S1, 66-77

Abstract: Nearly seventy-five years have elapsed since Henry Carey complained that the term laissez faire had become a meaningless symbol, an object, as he put it, of “word-worship.” If the task of definition seemed imposing in his time, it is not less so in ours. The concept has been used with abandon on various levels of political and economic discussion. It belongs to a whole category of catchwords in our social thought whose connotations, if they ever were precise, have become blurred through constant and polemical usage. They are dangerous labels for the historian. This paper seeks to analyze the ideas developed in Pennsylvania to oppose governmental action in economic life during the period from the Revolution to the Civil War. For the present purpose it is not a matter of significance whether one chooses to believe that any of these ideas are genuinely laissezfaire in character or not.

Date: 1943
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