From the beginning, economics has been a moral philosophy  — a vision of capitalist society  — as much as a social science.

In classical political economy, class was central to both. In the famous line from David Ricardo’s 1817 Principles, political economy’s “principal problem” was discovering the laws that determine how wealth is divided among the “three classes of the community”: laborer, capitalist, and landowner.

Marx, writing half a century later, charged that the classical paradigm had degenerated once the moral implications of Ricardo’s class analysis became too uncomfortable to bear. Apologists and “vulgar” economists had come to deny any fundamental disharmony of interests: production, they claimed, involved the cooperation of different classes, and the rewards to each reflected the freely agreed market value of what they contributed.