What a lot of people don’t seem to realise is that the reason Thomas Carlyle said that economics was a “dismal science” is that Carlyle was a complete racist who didn’t like the fact that economists (who back then were virtually all critical of big government) were calling for the abolition of slavery.

Writes Carlyle, “The social science [that] finds the secret of this universe in ‘supply and demand,’ and reduces the duty of human governors to that of letting men alone, is…what we might call…the dismal science. …[T]he Dismal Science, led by any sacred cause of black emancipation…will give birth to progenies and prodigies: dark extensive moon-calves, unnameable abortions, wide-coiled monstrosities, such as the world has not seen hitherto!”

Carlyle thought that if blacks were freed, it would be bad or “dismal” for society and even for blacks themselves, whom he claimed were benefitted by their oppression.

The economists, on the other hand, were calling for the abolition of this government-protected institution called slavery. Thus, Carlyle considered economists “dismal scientists,” that is, scientists who had goals that he considered “dismal.”

If an opposition to slavery makes one a “dismal scientist” in Carlyle’s book, then I say, viva la Dismal Science.

“What a lot of people don’t seem to realise is that the reason Thomas Carlyle said that economics was a “dismal science” is that Carlyle was a complete racist who didn’t like the fact that economists (who back then were virtually all critical of big government) were calling for the abolition of slavery.”
That’s utterly wrong. I won’t deny that Carlyle may have been a racialist (I deny the word ‘racist’ has any meaning), but his rejection was not of economics per se but of utilitarianism and the same sort of idiot jockeying that, in the modern era, mistakes a rise in GDP for a rise in happiness. Carlyle knew that there was more to life than money, such as security, order, etc. which were not accounted for in the simplistic paeans to liberalism. Carlyle, for all his faults and mistakes, was an extremely sophisticated analyst of social order, social psychology and the political economy and ideology of the modern State. Carlyle was one of the first to point out the inadequacy of the classical liberal utilitarian arguments to stand against the socialists and democrats, and correctly predicted the ideological and managerial nature of the future democratic states.

I suggest, next time, you actually read Carlyle before spouting off some Wikipedia nonsense about him.