1819

Birth year of John Ruskin, Walt Whitman, Herman Melville. Also Queen Victoria.

Lewis Mumford's Precursors

Just guessing, not based on any particular source: Ralph Waldo Emerson, Patrick Geddes, John Ruskin, William Morris, Herman Melville.

Ruskin against the Political Economists

From "Essay I" of Unto This Last (p. 168):

Observe, I neither impugn nor doubt the conclusion of the science if its terms are accepted. I am simply uninterested in them, as I should be in those of a science of gymnastics which assumed that men had no skeletons. It might be shown, on that supposition, that it would be advantageous to roll the students up into pellets, flatten them into cakes, or stretch them into cables; and that when these results were effected, the re-insertion of the skeleton would be attended with various inconveniences to their constitution. The reasoning might be admirable, the conclusions true, and the science deficient only in applicability. Modern political economy stands on a precisely similar basis. Assuming, not that the human being has no skeleton, but that it is all skeleton, i founds an ossifant theory of progress on this negation of a soul; and having shown the utmost that may be made of bones, and constructed a number of interesting geometrical figures with death's head and humeri, successfully proves the inconvenience of the reappearance of a soul among these corpuscular structures. I do not deny the truth of this theory: I simply deny its applicability to the present phase of the world.

Vaclav Havel on Tower Building

From the New York Review of Books (worth reading the entire short article):

I have to admit to something I don't know whether I can actually say here: I absolutely hated those two skyscrapers at the World Trade Center. They were a typical kind of architecture that has no ideas behind it. Moreover, they disrupted the skyline of the city; they towered absurdly over the beautiful crystalline topography of Manhattan. They were two monuments to the cult of profit at any cost: regardless of what they looked like, they had to have the greatest imaginable number of square meters of office space.

Marx on the "Anglo-Persian War"

The current propaganda war between Britain and Iran reminded me of this passage from an artical by Karl Marx entitled "Anglo-Persian War" that appeared in the New-York Daily Tribune on October 30, 1856:

So soon as the Company [i.e., the East India Company, acting as the foreign policy proxy for England] casts a greedy look on any of the independent sovereigns, or on any region whose political and commercial or whose gold and jewels are valued, the victim is accused of having violated this or that ideal or actual convention, transgressed an imaginary promise or restriction, committed some nebulous outrage, and then war is decalred, and the eternity of wrong, the perennial force of the fable of the wolf and the lamb, is again incarnadined in national history.

Carlyle and High Victorian Racism

David Brion Davis considers Carlyle's 1853 pamphlet Occasional Discourses on the Nigger Question [another source cites an 1849 version published as "Occasional Discourses on the Negro Question"] - which incidentally is the source of the expression "dismal science - as symptomatic of a rebirth of "official" scientific racism displacing earlier scientific notions of racial equality:

Despite the prejudice of Hume and some other eighteenth-century writers, and in striking contrast to post-Revolutionary France, most British scientists of the early 1800s, exemplified by James Cowles Pritchard, insisted on the unity and even perfectability of all human groups. The historian Seymour Drescher makes the extraordinary point that not a single M.P. spoke of any alleged incapacity of the Negroes. But by the 1850s African American visitors in Britain, like Frederick Douglass, sensed a deeply troubling change in attitude even from the mid-1840s (symbolized by Thomas Carlyle's 1853 Occasional Discourse on the Nigger Question). (Inhuman Bondage p. 76)

On the 'Dismal Science'

The once commonly held assumption that Carlyle’s directed the phrase “dismal science” toward the economics of Malthus (or Ricardo) has been thoroughly discredited. In fact, Carlyle does not seem to have much to say about Malthus or Ricardo throughout his writings.

Carlyle did use the word dismal in reference to Malthus ("The controversies on Malthus and the 'Population Principle', 'Preventative Check' and so forth, with which the public ear has been deafened for a long while, are indeed sufficiently mournful. Dreary, stolid, dismal, without hope for this world or the next, is all that of the preventative check and the denial of the preventative check." In Chartism, 1839).

Carlyle actually used the phrase “dismal science” in reference to a notion of racial equality advanced by John Stuart Mill. Carlyle justified slavery by believed that African laborers were morally inferior to white planters, who could legitimately force them to work. This argument countered Mill’s beliefs against racial inferiority and forced labor. Carlyle’s 1849 essay “An Occasional Discourse on the Negro Question” argued for the reintroduction of slavery into the West Indies, and directed against Mill the comment that liberal economics was not “a 'gay science,' I should say, like some we have heard of; no, a dreary, desolate and, indeed, quite abject and distressing one; what we might call, by way of eminence, the dismal science”

Interestingly, the phrase “gay science” against which Carlyle says “dismal science, derives from a Provençal expression (gaya scienza) used later by Nietzsche:

The “Songs of Prince Free-as-a-Bird,” written for the most part in Sicily, are quite emphatically reminiscent of the Provençal concept of gaya scienza – that unity of singer, knight, and free spirit which distinguishes the wonderful early culture of the Provençals from all equivocal cultures. The very last poem above all, “To the Mistral,” an exuberantly dancing song in which, if I may say so, one dances right over morality, is a perfect Provençalism. (in Ecce Homo)

Notwithstanding the above, the popular misconception contains a grain of truth. Mill’s political economy – along with similar strains of Benthanism or Utilitarianism – were criticized for attempting to reduce human behavior to mathematical formulae. In this sense, the Utilitarian spirit of economics was indeed dismal.