Consumption and Waste in Early Nineteenth-Century Political Economy

It is commonly argued that consumption played a minor role in the political economy of the early nineteenth century. Yet no systematic analysis of consumption in the history of economic thought has attempted to explain why. This article argues that a rupture occurred in the discourse on consumption after Adam Smith, who viewed it as a practice driven by humanity’s natural desire to consume and aimed at satisfying the needs and wants of the population. Jean-Baptiste Say transformed consumption into an abstract economic category and divided it into reproductive and unproductive consumption in the fifth book of his Traité d’Économie Politique. While scholarship on Say has focused predominantly on Say’s law, historians of economic thought have paid little attention to this book and its impact on the subsequent development of political economy. Building on Say’s framework, British political economists increasingly concentrated on production and accumulation in their efforts to develop a deductive science of political economy. Although reproductive consumption contributed to accumulation and remained central to their analysis, unproductive consumption was dismissed as wasteful destruction despite its role in satisfying wants. The distinction led to the progressive exclusion of unproductive consumption from the science of political economy throughout the nineteenth century, as it was instead relegated to the realm of domestic economy. However, the transformation of consumption in nineteenth-century political economy was never complete. Smith’s insights into the natural desire to consume persisted, most notably in the political economy of Thomas Robert Malthus and John Stuart Mill, revealing an enduring tension between consumption as a practice and consumption as an economic category.