Abstract
While it is generally believed that Marshall sought to diminish the economics of Jevons in setting out his own, little attention has been paid to the original, Millian, contexts in which both Jevons and Marshall turned to the study of political economy. Jevons’s first 1862 paper seems to have been prompted by the publication in 1861 of Mill’s account of utilitarianism; at the same time in Cambridge John Grote, Knightbridge Professor of Moral Philosophy, and a young Henry Sidgwick, Knightbridge Professor from 1883, were engaged in lively discussion of Mill’s arguments. Grote died in 1866, but the Grote Club continued to meet and it was in this context that Marshall met Sidgwick. Grote’s Critique of Mill, An Examination of the Utilitarian Philosophy (1870), and Sidgwick’s Methods of Ethics (1874) can be read in the light of these arguments of the 1860s, as can also Sidgwick’s own Principles of Political Economy (1883), which made use of Jevons’s conception of final utility. This Cambridge context sheds a new light on any differences between Jevons and Marshall.
This essay originated as an Istvan Hont Memorial Lecture presented at the University of St. Andrews, 11 May 2015, and was written up and revised with the support of Estonian Research Council Grant (PRG 318).
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Notes
- 1.
See for a narrative of the development of Marshall’s interest in political economy (Cook 2009: Ch. 5).
- 2.
Cournot (1980) Ch. IV is “The Law of Sales”; hence we could say that, for Cournot, “demand” is something that enables producers to sell things. Whitaker (1975 Vol. 2: 245) has Marshall’s notes on competitive equilibrium in Cournot’s Ch. VII, “On Competition among Producers”. Here Cournot explains the stability of an equilibrium by the behaviour of producers (of a generic product) with respect to each other (61): that if, deceived as to their real interests, they try to break away from the existing equilibrium, they will be brought back to it by a series of reactions. This is the core idea of what, as eventually developed by Edwin Chamberlin, became the modern theory of oligopoly as a market in which producers, seeking to retain market share in the sales of functionally similar products, seek to differentiate their product in some way from those of their competitors.
- 3.
Aligning my argument here with Stanley Jevons’s remarks about “that able but wrong-headed man, David Ricardo”, and not with Alfred Marshall’s implausible pleas for continuity—see Jevons (1957: li). Like Edgeworth, Jevons seems to have by-passed Mill’s Principles altogether in sketching out his approach to economic analysis.
- 4.
The scheme of lectures for the Special Board for Moral Science 1884–1885; Cambridge University Reporter 15 October 1884 p. 79. At this time, Foxwell gave the political economy lectures for the Tripos; Fawcett’s own Professorial lectures were primarily directed at poll men, students seeking an ordinary rather than an honours degree. Mary Paley, for example, as a moral sciences student, did not attend Fawcett’s lectures, but was taught by Sidgwick and Marshall (1947: 18).
- 5.
See Rita McWilliams Tullberg (1995); at Marshall’s suggestion, Mary Paley sat the Moral Sciences Tripos examination informally in December 1874 (pp. 55–56).
- 6.
Not least through covering several of its topics by publishing books: besides Methods of Ethics and Principles of Political Economy, in 1888 he published Outlines of the History of Ethics for English Readers and in 1891 The Elements of Politics. See Backhouse (2006: 17–21) for a summary of Methods of Ethics.
- 7.
At the time of the bicentenary of Wealth of Nations in 1976 this was the dominant tendency: the collection Essays on Adam Smith had very few contributions that would today be considered properly historical, and in its second half chapter after chapter places Adam Smith in relation to modern economic ideas. See Skinner and Wilson (1976); this was a companion volume to the new Glasgow editions of Theory of Moral Sentiments and Wealth of Nations.
- 8.
Including Nicholson, Foxwell, J. N. Keynes, Chapman, Flux, Macgregor as well as Pigou.
- 9.
Here I should note that by far the best account of Sidgwick’s moral philosophy, Schneewind (1977), does recognise the significance of the Tripos, and it opens by acknowledging that the very modernity of Sidgwick’s “tone and content” fosters the kind of approach which I criticise above. Schneewind’s purpose is to place Sidgwick with respect to the philosophical field of mid-nineteenth-century England, which he does very successfully; here I am concerned to suggest that this field was, in Sidgwick’s work, inflected by the framework provided by the Moral Sciences Tripos.
- 10.
Sometimes confused with his brother George Grote, banker, MP and historian of ancient Greece; see the index entry in Crisp (2015: 250).
- 11.
Mayor entered St. John’s College, Cambridge in 1847 and graduated in 1851 with the second-placed First in Classics. He was the author of “The Moral Sciences” in the first Student Guide to the University of Cambridge (1862: 140–52), and in 1863 one of the candidates for the chair of political economy, alongside Leonard Courtney and Henry Dunning Macleod. In October 1863, the post had been made permanent by the Senate, and it became a paid University appointment; following lobbying by Leslie Stephen, Henry Fawcett, who had also published his Manual of Political Economy that year, was appointed.
- 12.
Subsequently published as Jevons (1866). Jevons did not attend the meeting, but his paper was read out.
- 13.
For a summary of these and their significance see my (2017).
- 14.
Winstanley (1940: 80–81, 175). Winstanley goes on (179) to emphasise that Whewell was not an advocate of University lectures in themselves, but wished to improve the standing of professorial lectures so that they might be linked to subjects for examination, and also reduce the reliance on private tutors.
- 15.
The role of coaching for the Mathematics Tripos was different; here it was the private coaches who supplied the specialised teaching needed for a first-class degree that the colleges could not. While the Mathematics Tripos was very important in shaping Marshall’s thinking about the teaching of economics, that is not my immediate object here. On the role of coaches however see Clark (2008).
- 16.
The previous academic year Karl Marx had followed the same courses. Albert had studied in Brussels before attending Bonn, and he later corresponded with Quetelet about the latter’s On the Social System and the Laws which Regulate It (1848)—Palfrey (2002: 106, fn. 44).
- 17.
He later published Lectures on the History of Moral Philosophy in England (1852), which ran roughly from Hobbes to Bentham in eighteen lectures.
- 18.
See Kubo (2013); although no attention is paid here to the context in which Pryme gave his lectures, which rendered them entirely marginal to teaching at Cambridge.
- 19.
In December 1863, Mayor married Grote’s ward and niece Alexandrina Jessie Grote and so had to surrender his college living. He taught first at Kensington School in London, then being appointed Professor at King’s College, London, first in classical literature and then, from 1879 to 1883, in moral philosophy (Gibbins 2004); more generally (Gibbins 2007).
- 20.
J. R. Mozley to J. B. Mayor, 21 April 1904, Holly Bank, Headingley, Leeds; Trinity College Library Add. Ms.c 104/66: “There was no doubt of Sidgwick preferring ethics to metaphysics, as he always did; the practical side in him was always very strong (I remember Alfred Marshall emphasising his admiration of this side of him, very soon after he made his acquaintance) and he distrusted metaphysics as much as Mill did – I remember his saying to me once, that he thought Kant was like a difficult mathematical book; you might hope to understand him if you gave trouble enough to the work; whereas he did not think Hegel was intelligible at all…”.
- 21.
Intending to read the flysheets of first Grote then Mayor on a visit to Trinity College Library in 2015, at first no copy of the Grote flysheet could be located, so I read Mayor’s. Then in the afternoon a copy of Grote’s was found, and so I read it having already gained an understanding of the contemporary issues from Mayor. The rather scrappy and incomplete nature of Grote’s contribution was therefore very obvious. This is no disparagement of Grote, but rather a clue as to how Grote’s Examination of the Utilitarian Philosophy (1870) came to be as coherent as it is.
- 22.
See the discussion of this in Phyllis Deane (2001: 115–19).
- 23.
The revisions to Methods of Ethics were extensive, Sidgwick producing a supplement to the first edition in 1878, to the second edition in 1884, the sixth edition of 1901 including further revisions. Schneewind works with the seventh edition, taking account of the effect of previous revisions; I work with the first edition, since I presume that it is here that any filiation to the work of Grote will be more obvious.
- 24.
This was in relation to the Anglican conditions placed upon him, linked to the ongoing efforts to remove religious disabilities from fellows already mentioned; I discuss the circumstances related to this in my essay (2017: 915–16).
- 25.
Implied by Mayor in his letter to Eleanor Sidgwick, 28 April 1904 Queensgate House, Kingston Hill (Trinity College Library Add Ms. C 1104/68).
- 26.
Letter of J. B. Mayor to Eleanor Sidgwick, 28 April 1904 op. cit.
- 27.
Republished in book form as Utilitarianism in 1863.
- 28.
Whitaker notes that Marshall’s copy of the book shows signs of careful reading—(1975 Vol. I: 46 n. 29).
- 29.
This work was revised in detail several times, the posthumous 7th edition of 1907 being the one most commonly referred to today. Since I am interested in how close Sidgwick’s arguments are to those of Grote I use the first edition only.
- 30.
This corresponds to pp. 123–4 in the 7th edition (Hackett Publishing Company, Indianapolis 1981), but there these different ideas are split up and the impact considerably weakened by Sidgwick’s revisions.
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Tribe, K. (2021). Utilitarianism, the Moral Sciences and Political Economy: Mill-Grote-Sidgwick. In: Caldari, K., Dardi, M., Medema, S.G. (eds) Marshall and the Marshallian Heritage. Palgrave Studies in the History of Economic Thought. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-53032-7_7
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