 In this respect as well, political economy of the nineteenth century was significantly different in tenor; it put center-stage the plight of the poor, the expansion of suffrage to working men, and their entitlement to form trade unions. Socialist economic thought only emerged in the beginning of the nineteenth century, particularly in France. There were antecedents, such as the English Levellers Gerrard Winstanley and John Lilburne, and the Dutch reformers Johan De Witt and Pieter de la Court, but they were not important contributors to economic discourse. To a significant degree, Smith served as the inflection point, with his famous statement that “no society can surely be flourishing and happy, of which the far greater part of the members are poor and miserable”, or that merchants “have an interest to deceive and even to oppress the public” (Smith 1776 [1976: 96, 267]). British and French economic thought, with some exceptions, leaned primarily toward socialism throughout the nineteenth century. Ricardo exposed the parasitical standing of the landowning class, and spawned a radical following that included both James and John Stuart Mill, as well as a group known as the Ricardian socialists. In fact, many of the early neoclassical economists, for example William Stanley Jevons, Alfred Marshall, and Léon Walras, were democratic socialists of one stripe or another. It is not a challenge to plaster a very different and far more conservative tenor to mainstream economics of the twentieth century, whether one looks to Vilfredo Pareto, Irving Fisher, Schumpeter, Hayek or Friedman. Attending to the political hue of economic discourse serves all the more to distinguish the early modern period from the classical school of political economy of the nineteenth century or the neoclassical school that persists to the present.