"The expenses of the royal household, wars, and lavish public building were financed by tolls and the profits of the king's foreign trade monopoly, by conscription of labour and heavy taxation. The results were impoverishment of the masses, alienation of land, and the development of a proletariat."

“It is generally conceded that mercantile capitalism preceded and prepared the ground for modern industrial capitalism.”

“Mill sought to strengthen his defence of trade unions not by denying their possible monopoly effects, but by an appeal to the principle of laisser faire itself. To prevent the formation of corporate unions was, he thought, to interfere with a right obviously included in the general rule of freedom of contract.”

“Ideas appropriate to a past social order have a strange power of influencing thought and action within a later institutional frame work.”

“Aristotle laid the foundation of the distinction between use-value andexchange-value, which has remained a part of economic thought to the present day.”

“Whatever his merits as an economist, Hume's place as one of the foremost exponents of capitalism is clearly established. His views on the landed interest and his recognition of self-interest and his desire for accumulation as the driving forces of economic activity in his time helped to consolidate the forces that were struggling to add political power to the economic supremacy which they had already achieved.”

“The whole Marxian system springs from classical political economy as it found expression in Ricardo.”