@article{THESIS,
      recid = {4835},
      author = {Burnfin, Daniel Alan},
      title = {Greater than Itself: Value, Capital, and Involuntary  Unemployment in Classical Political Economy},
      publisher = {University of Chicago},
      school = {Ph.D.},
      address = {2022-08},
      number = {THESIS},
      pages = {420},
      abstract = {This dissertation addresses a contentious topic within the  history of political economy and the interpretation of  several influential theories which engage with it. It is  what I call the “problem of overproduction or  underconsumption” (POU), which is intimately related to  involuntary unemployment. The orthodox, classical theory of  political economy (i.e., Adam Smith, Jean Baptiste Say, and  David Ricardo), I argue, can neither recognize nor explain  the POU as an actual problem, because its fundamental  assumptions rule out the very possibility of the POU a  priori (e.g., Say’s Law). Indeed, Smith implicitly and Say  and Ricardo explicitly state that the POU is impossible. In  his philosophical discussion of modern poverty and the  “rabble” (Pöbel), G.W.F. Hegel, meanwhile, recognizes the  possibility of the POU, because he recognizes it as  something that actually happens in modern society. And,  interestingly, he also seems to suggest that it is the  cause of involuntary unemployment and the “rabble”. Because  he is still steeped in the assumptions of the orthodox,  classical theory, however, he cannot fundamentally or  sufficiently explain it. In his Capital, Karl Marx  ultimately presents alternative assumptions with which the  POU and involuntary unemployment can be recognized and  explained. They are his novel concepts of value and  capital. His theory of the dynamic of capital investment  presents one possible explanation of what he calls the  “surplus population” or “industrial reserve army” of the  unemployed, which is arguably just what Hegel means by the  “rabble”. The payoff, as it were, of the research presented  here is threefold: first, a view according to which Hegel’s  phenomenon can arguably be saved; second, a philosophical  analysis of the limits of orthodox, classical political  economy; and finally, a novel interpretation of Marx’s  economic theory of capitalist societies, according to which  it is closer to the post-Keynesian school of macroeconomics  than the orthodox, classical school or David Ricardo  (“labor theory of value”).},
      url = {http://knowledge.uchicago.edu/record/4835},
      doi = {https://doi.org/10.6082/uchicago.4835},
}