Book contents
- Frontmatter
- CONTENTS
- List of Contributors
- Preface
- Introduction: The character and reputation of an ‘acquitted felon’
- 1 The Lives of John Thelwall: Another View of the ‘Jacobin Fox’
- 2 Usual and Unusual Suspects: John Thelwall, William Godwin and Pitt's Reign of Terror
- 3 Thelwall in his own Defence: The Natural and Constitutional Right of Britons
- 4 Labour, Contingency, Utility: Thelwall's Theory of Property
- 5 ‘A Loud, a Fervid, and Resolute Remonstrance with our Rulers’: John Thelwall, the People and Political Economy
- 6 John Thelwall's Radical Vision of Democracy
- 7 Articulations of Community in The Peripatetic
- 8 Domestic Invasions: John Thelwall and the Exploitation of Privacy
- 9 ‘The Dungeon and the Cell’: The Prison Verse of Coleridge and Thelwall
- 10 Thelwall's Two Plays Against Empire: Incle and Yarico (1787) and The Incas (1792)
- 11 A ‘Double Visag'd Fate’: John Thelwall and the Hapless Hope of Albion
- 12 The Conceptual Underpinnings of John Thelwall's Elocutionary Practices
- 13 Tracing the Textual Reverberation: The Role of Thelwall's Elocutionary Selections in the British Lyceum
- 14 ‘Not Precedents to be Followed but Examples to be Weighed’: John Thelwall and the Jacobin Sense of the Past
- Notes
- Works Cited
- Index
4 - Labour, Contingency, Utility: Thelwall's Theory of Property
- Frontmatter
- CONTENTS
- List of Contributors
- Preface
- Introduction: The character and reputation of an ‘acquitted felon’
- 1 The Lives of John Thelwall: Another View of the ‘Jacobin Fox’
- 2 Usual and Unusual Suspects: John Thelwall, William Godwin and Pitt's Reign of Terror
- 3 Thelwall in his own Defence: The Natural and Constitutional Right of Britons
- 4 Labour, Contingency, Utility: Thelwall's Theory of Property
- 5 ‘A Loud, a Fervid, and Resolute Remonstrance with our Rulers’: John Thelwall, the People and Political Economy
- 6 John Thelwall's Radical Vision of Democracy
- 7 Articulations of Community in The Peripatetic
- 8 Domestic Invasions: John Thelwall and the Exploitation of Privacy
- 9 ‘The Dungeon and the Cell’: The Prison Verse of Coleridge and Thelwall
- 10 Thelwall's Two Plays Against Empire: Incle and Yarico (1787) and The Incas (1792)
- 11 A ‘Double Visag'd Fate’: John Thelwall and the Hapless Hope of Albion
- 12 The Conceptual Underpinnings of John Thelwall's Elocutionary Practices
- 13 Tracing the Textual Reverberation: The Role of Thelwall's Elocutionary Selections in the British Lyceum
- 14 ‘Not Precedents to be Followed but Examples to be Weighed’: John Thelwall and the Jacobin Sense of the Past
- Notes
- Works Cited
- Index
Summary
Introduction
Though one of the most important and influential British pamphleteers of the 1790s, John Thelwall never composed a systematic political theory. The closest he came was probably his The Rights of Nature Against the Usurpations of Establishments, a work that has received increasing attention from historians of political and economic thought in recent years. Published in 1796, at a time when Britain had experienced almost famine conditions, the third of the four letters that comprise The Rights of Nature offers an impassioned, often indignant account of the economic oppression suffered by a labouring poor at the mercy of the tyranny of their employers and the state. But more than this, it – mainly through a neat twist on Locke's labour theory of value – makes an impressive and innovative case for the moral entitlement of individual workers to the fruits of their labour and thus for a significant redistribution of material resources. Indeed, as several scholars have noted, Thelwall's account would seem to have anticipated (if that is not too terribly Whiggish a term to use) the conceptualisation of worker exploitation later developed by socialist thinkers.
Thelwall's critical account of the distribution of material resources is thus regarded by historians as a crucial bridge from the eclipse of the eighteenth-century republican tradition by its radical liberal and socialist successors. Perhaps unsurprisingly, then, it is the redistributive aspect of Thelwall's argument – the proto-socialist analysis of exploited workers and the corresponding case for the redistribution of resources – that has occupied the attention of most historians and political theorists. There has been far less interest in the theoretical case that Thelwall marshals for private property rights themselves: in other words, how he is able to argue that the right to private property ownership is an inviolable moral right in the first place; what his justification for that right is. This chapter explores this issue in order to raise an interpretive issue that concerns how historians of ideas can (or perhaps even should) understand Thelwall's political writing.
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- Information
- John ThelwallRadical Romantic and Acquitted Felon, pp. 51 - 60Publisher: Pickering & ChattoFirst published in: 2014