Because of the marked improvements in trade, transportation, and communication during the Industrial Revolution, people whose ancestors had lived in isolation and extreme poverty were able to realize a great amelioration in their living conditions; for the same reasons, social observers became far more aware of their plight than in previous centuries. One consequence is that early historians, lacking any basis for chronological comparison, tended to impute these negative conditions falsely to the new industrialization. This older view has since been thoroughly refuted, and the Industrial Revolution is now recognized as an era of unprecedented progress and rising living standards (). The movement known as "classical economics" (cf. pp. 4.4:34-5) can be regarded in part as an attempt to explain scientifically the remarkable advances of that period. The classical school was essentially launched by Adam Smith in his Wealth of Nations (1776) and included, among other economic luminaries, Thomas Malthus and David Ricardo in England and J. B. Say and Frédéric Bastiat in France. The economic world, these theorists argued, is subject to its own natural laws. Political freedom does not mean chaos, because it enables spontaneous forces in the marketplace to create a natural order. In order to promote prosperity, according to these economists, the government should allow free trade and leave economic matters—including even education, personal affairs, and charity—in private hands. The role of government was to be limited to the function of securing rights (and hence the free market), while allowing voluntary forms of human action to perform all other functions. This philosophy was dubbed laissez-faire (literally, "allow to do") by detractors, whose political-reductionist world-view (cf. pp. 3.12:13-36) led them to dismiss it as a "do-nothing" approach.     

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