Work and the workman: an address to the Trades' Union Congress

Abstract

I believe I am indebted for the privilege of addressing you today to the impression produced on the minds of some of your leaders by a discourse which I delivered at a recent meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science. What I proposed to myself in that discourse was to show that certain prevailing ideas as to the constitution and method of Economic science required revision and amendment. Whilst recognizing the valuable work done by economists, and notably by Adam Smith, I endeavoured to show that many of them, by taking abstractions for realities, by drawing unverified deductions from a priori assumptions, and by giving to their conclusions, even when in a certain sense just, too absolute a character, missed the truth, and set up figments of their own imagination for laws of social life.