Faced with the problems of poverty and inequality, theorists, Thompson insists, divide into two schools: the intellectual and the mechanical. Intellectual speculators such as Godwin, concerned with ideals, favour equality, but they overstress the powers of mere mind; in phrases reminiscent of Marx's later critique of the young Hegelians in the German Ideology, ‘the intellectual aristocrat … [forgets] … that without [labour's] kindly and ever-recurring aid in the supply of food, clothing and shelter, the high intellectual energies, of which he boasts, could scarcely for one hundred hours preserve themselves’ (v). Mechanical speculators such as Malthus, concerned with material realities, argue that inequality is inevitable and beneficial to production, but they ignore moral considerations. ‘Here is the important problem of moral science to be solved, “how to reconcile equality with security; how to reconcile just distribution with continued production”’ (xiv). This is the issue addressed in Thompson's weighty volume. The essentials of his solution are furnished in the first chapter, a chapter that would by itself constitute a modest book in late twentieth-century terms. The job is done by the establishment of three principles: first, that labour is the sole parent of wealth; second, that an equal distribution is most conducive to happiness; and third, that production is maximized if each labourer receives the full fruits of his labour, an arrangement that tends to equality.