4.4 Colonel Perronet Thompson: anti-Ricardian Benthamite

We must pause a moment to consider the fascinating character of Colonel Perronet Thompson, an ardent Benthamite radical, and a champion of free trade and opponent of the Corn Laws. Thompson, the son of a prosperous merchant and banker from Sussex, and MP for a decade, spent the first part of his adult life in the military, retiring from active service in 1922 at the age of 39 with the rank of lieutenant. Despite this relatively low rank, Thompson had been made the first royal governor of the colony of Sierra Leone in 1808, but got himself recalled quickly by clamouring for the abolition of the slave trade. His removal by the Tory British government over the issue of slavery radicalized young Thompson, whose education in classical liberalism was further advanced by reading Adam Smith and Turgot. After retiring from active service, Thompson was compensated for his low rank in important work over a long military career by being repeatedly promoted while inactive. By the time of his death, Thompson had risen to the rank of full general.

Before going into military service, Thompson had graduated from Queen's College, Cambridge, and been made a fellow of that college. On retiring from the military life, he joined Bentham's circle of admirers and plunged into Benthamite utilitarianism and radicalism. Thompson's first published work appeared in the very first issue of Bentham's own periodical, the Westminster Review (1824). His True Theory of Rent, designed to uphold Adam Smith's views on rent as against Ricardo, followed; and the next year, Perronet Thompson published his well-known Catechism on the Corn Laws (1827), generally considered the most important work in the entire anti-Corn Law literature. Later, Thompson became one of the most effective members of the Anti-Corn Law League. In 1829, only half a decade since his plunge into politics, the now Lieutenant Colonel Thomas Perronet Thompson became the sole owner of the Benthamite Westminster Review, and contributed articles to every issue until relinquishing ownership seven years later. After being defeated for Parliament in 1834, Thompson won election a year later, taking his stand with George Grote and the philosophic radicals in Parliament. Losing his seat two years later, he ran several times unsuccessfully, serving in Parliament from 1847 to 1852, and again from 1857 to 1859.

Thompson's writings were prolific, and in many areas. At the age of 59, a six-volume collection of his writings to date was published, Exercises, Political and Others (1842), and he kept writing pamphlets and newspaper articles on democratic reform until the day before his death, at the age of 86. In addition to his widespread political and economic concerns, Thompson wrote and published works on mathematics, the science of acoustics, and the theory of musical harmony. An organ built on the lines of Thompson's harmonic theory received honourable mention at the Great Exhibition of 1851.

Thompson contributed more to economics than his attack on rent. His first article in the Westminster Review, ‘On the Instrument of Exchange’, followed Bentham's own inflationist views by advocating an inconvertible paper currency. Another, equally dubious, contribution of Thompson's in the same essay followed up a hint made ten years before by Malthus. Malthus, who had been trained in mathematics at Cambridge, had observed, in a pamphlet in 1814, that differential calculus might prove useful in the theory of morals, economics and politics, since many questions in these disciplines centre around the pursuit of maxima and minima. By the time of the publication of his Principles of Political Economy in 1820, however, Malthus had wisely grown sceptical of the possibilities of maths in economics as well as in ethics and politics. Thompson, however, also trained in mathematics at Cambridge, had no such scruples, and his 1824 article opened a fateful door by using the differential calculus in defining a maximum gain. The perfect Benthamite, steeped in looking at maxima of pleasure and minima of pain, had struck a fateful chord; Pandora's Box had been opened.

Thompson's sympathy for mathematical economics, however, did not keep him from denouncing the Smith-Ricardo search for a fixed and invariable measure of value, which he wisely dismissed as a chimera. Furthermore, in the Westminster Review in 1832, Thompson trenchantly criticized all cost theories of value, pointing out that cost and price almost always differ. And these differences, he added, are not accidental and ephemeral, as Smith and especially Ricardo assumed in their focus on the long-run ‘natural’ price; on the contrary, these ‘short-run’ differences are the essence of the dynamic real world: ‘This perpetual oscillation on both sides of the cost price, instead of being an inconsiderable accident, is in reality the great agent by which the commercial world is kept in motion’.