About this Book One of Econlib's aims is to put online the most
significant works in the history of economic thought, and there
can be no doubting the significance of Marx's influence on both
economic theory in the late 19th century and on the creation of
Marxist states in the 20th century. From the time of the
emergence of modern socialism in the 1840s (especially in France
and Germany), free market economists have criticised socialist
theory and it is thus useful to place that criticism in its
intellectual context, namely beside the main work of one of its
leading theorists, Karl Marx. In 1848, when Europe was wracked
by a series of revolutions in which both liberals and socialists
participated and which both lost out to the forces of
conservative monarchism or Bonapartism, John Stuart Mill
published his Principles of Political Economy. The chapter on
Property shows how important Mill thought it was to confront the
socialist challenge to classical liberal economic theory. In
hindsight it might appear that M