If industry is how things are made, and a revolution is an extreme change, then what is an industrial revolution?

John Majewski is an economics major at the University of Texas at Austin. He is currently serving as a summer intern with the Institute for Humane Studies. Following graduation in 1988, John hopes to pursue a Ph.D. in economics. This paper was awarded second prize, college division, in FEE’s Freedom Essay Contest,
How the industrial revolution raised the quality of life for workers and their families.
Since it began approximately two centuries ago, the industrial revolution has captured the minds of an endless number of historians and economists. An era of relatively laissez faire economics, the period between 1760-1850 is for many academics the key to unlocking the secrets of economic growth, technological change, and economic development. But, for defenders of the classical liberal tradition of free enterprise, the industrial revolution is important for more insidious reasons. Writers such as Dickens, Engels, and the Hammonds have made the terms industrial revolution and capitalism synonymous with degradation of the working class. Pessimistic interpretations of the industrial revolution have led to the popular acceptance of what R.M. Hartwell terms the “theory of immiseration”—a belief that unrestrained capitalism was making the rich richer and the poor poorer during the industrial revolution (Hartwell, 1974). For the general public, the horrors of the industrial revolution prove the horrors of capitalism.