The purpose of this article is to introduce the student interested in social economics to a venerable tradition that goes back even further in history than do the other perspectives rooted in Thorstein Veblen, Karl Marx, or the late nineteenth century encyclical of Pope Leo XIII. It started with the Swiss Count Jean Charles Leonard Simonde de Sismondi publishing his New Principles of Political Economy in 1819, and has continued through Thomas Carlyle, John Ruskin, John Atkinson Hobson, and Richard H. Tawney into contemporary times.