Gloomy Scottish sage and highly influential man of letters, Thomas Carlyle was the leading British disciple of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and German Romanticism.  He was also, in his youth, quite partial to Saint-Simonism and a supporter of the Chartist movement.  However, in later life, the positions he took on political and economic affairs seemed more in  line with reactionary Toryism.

    Carlyle is renowned for his passionate, preacher-like opposition to industrial society that was emerging in Britain, captured in his Chartism (1840) and, especially, Past and Present (1843), a book much admired by  Frederick Engels.  Carlyle was not an economist or even a scholar, but more like an Old Testament prophet.  His utter disdain for economists and economics is well known -- it was he who characterized it as "the dismal science".  In his view, it was the economists and their theories which served as the apologistic ideological and religious buttress of the industrial revolution that, in his view, was destroying Britain.  At one point, he recommended that economists ought to be "popularly elected" as a way to make them accountable to the population that their theories were helping ruin.  Nonetheless, he was, at least for a time, a friend of John Stuart Mill.  He was also a close friend of  fellow sage, John Ruskin.

    Thomas Carlyle was a "feudalist" (if such a term can be allowed). But he does not pine for old-fashioned reactionary aristocracy or pastoral romance.  Rather, Carlyle absorbed Goethe's ideas on the "natural", in particular the relationship between external order and personal freedom.  He conceived that the end of human activity is activity itself -- the Protestant ethic, secularly enhanced.  (the best account of Goethe's social philosophy is contained in his Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship (1796) -- which  Carlyle translated into English in 1824. Incidentally, Carlyle also translated Legendre's Elements of Geometry and Trigonometry in 1824.)

    For Carlyle, the feudal system's sole value is that it is much better at assigning a man an activity and thereafter granting him the freedom to pursue it in any manner he pleases.  In contrast, a market system assigns him no activity, but simultaneously becomes the hardest taskmaster of all by forcing him to "serve it" by chasing wage labor, profit, etc.  He sees a market society as "unnatural" as it forces people to pursue consumption and accumulation, whereas, in Carlyle's view, people's nature is to pursue activity.  Thus, for Carlyle, the feudal system may be harsh in limiting social mobility, but it offers freedom of activity at the individual level and the joy of craftsmanship.  In contrast, the market system is socially much more progressive, but at the individual level, it forces everybody into the unnatural activities of gain and acquisition.

    Carlyle's darkest moment was the publication of his infamous defense of slavery (in his 1849 Fraser's Magazine) and his venomous Latter-Day Pamphlets (1850).  His attack on economics was most explicit here:

"Truly, my philanthropic friends, Exeter Hall [evangelical abolitionist] Philanthropy is wonderful; and the Social Science—not a “gay science,” but a rueful — which finds the secret of this universe in “supply-and-demand,” and reduces the duty of human governors to that of letting men alone, is also wonderful. 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. These two, Exeter Hall Philanthropy and the Dismal Science, led by any sacred cause of Black Emancipation, or the like, to fall in love and make a wedding of it,—will give birth to progenies and prodigies; dark extensive moon-calves, unnameable abortions, wide-coiled monstrosities, such as the world has not seen hitherto!"

 (Thomas Carlyle, "Occasional Discourse on the Negro Question", 1849, Fraser's Magazine)

    Needless to say, his arguments in defense of slavery were not logically inconsistent with his general social philosophy, they were just taking it to an extreme degree and expressed in an extreme tone.  Theoretically, Carlyle saw little difference between a black slave in a slave society and a joyous yeoman in a feudal society-- except that one is loyally bound to his task by chains and whips, and the other by tradition and custom.  In either case, the "joy of work" is (eventually) achieved.  Add to this the "happy slaves" propaganda of the American southerners and their "Gone with the Wind" feudal mimicry, add to this his own personal racism and gloominess, add his always exaggerated writing style, add the urgency of his message and the need to "turn up the volume", and, finally, add the pleasure he took in offending the pious and sanctimonious evangelical Christians he despised (a "Nuke the Whales" sort of glee), and the extremity of his 1849-50 writings may be contextually clearer.

    But neither a feudal society nor a slave society are being "recommended" by Carlyle.  His early flirtation with Saint-Simonism, which embraced industrial society (but tried to rationalize it) proves that he was not a traditionalist lords-and-yeoman feudalist, much less a master-and-slave feudalist.  The main issue, the only issue, was the "man-must-work" principle of Saint-Simon and Goethe.  How this can be achieved in an industrial society, he did not know nor did he have practical policy suggestions for.  He was a man of letters.  He wrote to shock.

    Although Carlyle is often lumped together with Charles Dickens (who dedicated his novel, Hard Times to him), utopian socialists and other deplorers of industrial society, his fierce belief in "feudalist individualism" sets him quite apart.   But his observation of the deplorable effect of industrial society on the joy of work was not unique: his arguments, if not his tone, can also be found in Smith and Marx.
 

http://cepa.newschool.edu/het/profiles/carlyle.htm

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