Soundbite: Dismal Humanists
2nd April 2010
The eminent Victorian Thomas Carlyle famously castigated economics as “the dismal science.” The epithet first appeared in his 1849 screed, “Occasional Discourse on the Negro Question” — in which the “humanist” attacked free-market economists for their role in the anti-slavery movement. For Carlyle and “progressives” such as John Ruskin and Charles Dickens, economics was dismal because it sought to replace hierarchy with democracy.