The Socialist Visions of John Stuart Mill and Léon Walras: Expanding Forms of Socialized Property Within a Market Economy

This paper examines the socialist proposals of John Stuart Mill and Léon Walras. While Walras harshly criticized Mill’s Ricardian framework, he agreed with Mill that the establishment of property relations was a matter of social evolution and political choice. They both criticized nineteenth-century socialists who tried to constrain economic competition, and both shared similar views on the contributions of Saint-Simonian thought. They argued that a just economy required the more equal distribution of wealth and greater worker empowerment through the formation of cooperatives within a competitive market system. Their views were not identical. Mill also considered the viability of small-scale communal ownership systems while Walras proposed that the state should be the owner of all national resources and replace tax revenue with the funds obtained by leasing out land to competitive enterprises. Neither Mill nor Walras presented a plausible historical dynamic that might lead to this form of decentralized market socialism.