Political Economy and Its Public Contenders 1820– 1850 Stefan AQ1 Gaardsmand Jacobsen Email stefangj@gmail.com Thomas Palmelund Johansen Email tjohansen@cas.au.dk Copenhagen Business School AQ2 , Frederiksberg, Denmark Department of Culture and Society, Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark Abstract The abstract is published online only. If you did not include a short abstract for the online version when you submitted the manuscript, the first paragraph or the first 10 lines of the chapter will be displayed here. If possible, please provide us with an informative abstract. In the early nineteenth century it was not at all evident what kind of a science, if at all, political economy was supposed to be. Writers of the discipline attempted to establish themselves as members of a scientific field, while being attacked by socialist and working-class opponents for being capitalist interest disguised as science. Drawing on material from the working-class periodical literature and private correspondences of the political economists in Britain and France, this chapter explores the struggle over the scientific status of the political economists in the 1820s to 1840s. By comparing the debates across the Channel the chapter shows both the national differences and the border-crossing inspirations for the political economists and the socialist movements alike. The chapter argues that the struggle over the status of political economy in this period needs to be understood as a struggle between competing economic rationalities. This struggle was instrumental in the lasting theoretical cooperation between French and British liberal economic thinkers, which who aimed at placing the principles of unhindered trade at the basis of any acceptable economic policy. 9.1. Introduction From the 1820s to the 1840s, political economy was becoming established as a science in its own right (Augello and Guidi 2001 ), but the main doctrines to support this scientific development was questioned both by certain founding fathers and by those who challenged its universal applicability. The question of interest became central here: could political economists dress themselves in the ropes of the uninterested scientist searching only for observable natural laws? Or was there indeed a question of political interest to be tackled on every page of a treatise on political economy? In many aspects, the theoretical debates on interest and general applicability of economic ideas echoed the French and British writings on political economy emerging in the 1760s and 1770s. In this chapter, we want to highlight the ways in which claims to a scientific authority on the economy was constructed and attacked in both Britain and France. The main reason for investigating this case across the Channel, is that there was a common understanding that economic and social questions were not only applicable in one national setting. There was an awareness of the structural similarities in the industrial developments and in the different possible political responses (Prothero 2006 ). Thus, both the emerging group of self-professed “political economists” and their critics often related to debates and writings traveling between these two early movers of European industrialism. This chapter provides a comparative analysis of the two opposite notions of economic rationalities in a 1,* 2 1 2