4.13 Notes

1. J.A. Schumpeter, History of Economic Analysis (New York: Oxford University Press, 1954), p. 473 (italics in original).

2. Alexander Gray, The Development of Economic Doctrine (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1931), pp. 170–71. Noting that Ricardo habitually wrote in sweeping conclusions, followed by mumbled qualifications and backtrackings, enabling his followers to claim that such pursuers of the Ricardian logic as Marx and Henry George ‘misrepresented’ Ricardo, Gray retorts that ‘perhaps the final lesson to be learned from Ricardo is that the literary graces are not merely ornamental but useful, and that he who is deficient in the art of expression has only himself to blame if he is misrepresented’. Amen! Ibid., p. 189.

3. No more delightful passage has been written on the effectiveness of the obscure than in the sparkling essay of H.L. Mencken on the work of Thorstein Veblen: ‘What was genuinely remarkable about them [Veblen's ideas] was not their novelty, or their complexity, nor even the fact that a professor should harbor them; it was the astoundingly grandiose and rococo manner of their statement, the almost unbelievable tediousness and flatulence of the gifted headmaster's prose, his unprecedented talent for saying nothing in an august and heroic manner... If one tunneled under his great moraines and stalagmites of words, dug down into his vast kitchen-midden of discordant and raucous polysyllables, blew up the hard, thick shell of his almost theological manner, what one found in his discourse was chiefly a mass of platitudes – the self-evident made horrifying, the obvious in terms of the staggering.

‘Marx, I daresay, had said a good deal of it long before him, and what Marx overlooked had been said over and over again by his heirs and assigns. But Marx, at this business, labored under a technical handicap; he wrote in German, a language he actually understood. Professor Veblen submitted himself to no such disadvantage. Though born, I believe, in these States, and resident here all his life, he achieved the effect, perhaps without employing the means, of thinking in some unearthly foreign language – say Swahili, Sumerian or Old Bulgarian – and then painfully clawing his thought into a copious but uncertain and book-learned English. The result was a style that affected the higher cerebral centers like a constant roll of subway expresses. The second result was a sort of bewildered numbness of the senses, as before some fabulous and unearthly marvel. And the third result, if I make no mistake, was the celebrity of the professor as a Great Thinker.’ H.L. Mencken, ‘Professor Veblen’, A Mencken Crestomathy (New York: Knopf, 1949), pp. 269–70.

4. St Clair writes about the poet and ardent Ricardian Thomas De Quincey: ‘De Quincey, a great admirer of Ricardo, attributed his obscurity to profundity of thought. It is natural, said the author of the Opium Eater, that a man of brilliant intellect should express himself in elliptical language, difficult for less gifted persons to follow...’. Oswald St Clair, A Key to Ricardo (1957, New York: M. Kelley, 1965), p. xxiii.

5. Schumpeter, op. cit., note 1, p. 474.

6. Senior's ancestors had been prosperous merchants. His grandfather, Nassau Thomas Senior, had converted from Judaism to Christianity in the mid-eighteenth century. Nassau Thomas's father, Moses Aaron Senior, had emigrated from Hamburg in the 1720s; he had come from a long line of Spanish-Portuguese Jews who had been merchants and financiers in Spain and had emigrated to Amsterdam and Hamburg.

7. S.G. Checkland, ‘The Propagation of Ricardian Economics in England’, Economica, n.s., 16 (Feb. 1949), pp. 40–52; Ronald Meek, ‘The Decline of Ricardian Economics in England’, Economica, n.s. 17 (Feb. 1950), pp. 43–62.

8. Other writers doggedly pushing underconsumptionist fallacies in this period include the protectionist Yorkshire landowner and later MP Edward Stillingfleet Cayley (1802–62); Captain William R.A. Pettman; and a top royal bureaucrat in India, Sir William Henry Sleeman (1788–1856).

9. Since Meek's article, D.P. O'Brien, in the first comprehensive study of McCulloch, has demonstrated that McCulloch had abandoned the Ricardian labour theory of value for the more qualified Smithian cost-of-production theory. In fact, O'Brien shows that McCulloch was far more Smithian than Ricardian. D.P. O'Brien, J.R. McCulloch: A Study in Classical Economics (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1970).

10. Frank W. Fetter, ‘The Rise and Decline of Ricardian Economies’, History of Political Economy, 1 (Spring 1969), pp. 67–84.

11. Quoted in Barry Gordon, ‘Criticism of Ricardian Views on Value and Distribution in the British Periodicals, 1820–1850’, History of Political Economy, 1 (Autumn 1969), p. 380.

12. Schumpeter, op. cit., note 1, p. 580n. Also see Edwin Cannan, A History of the Theories of Production & Distribution (3rd ed., London: Staples Press, 1917), pp. 133–4.

13. Frank A. Fetter, ‘Rent’, Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, reprinted in M. Rothbard (ed.), Capital, Interest, and Rent: Essays in the Theory of Distribution, by Frank A. Fetter (Kansas City: Sheed Andrews & McMeel, 1977), p. 368.

14. It has only recently been recognized that Bailey was philosophically Austrian – an insight buried in Robert Rauner's neglected 1956 doctoral dissertation at the University of London, ‘Samuel Bailey and Classical Economics’. Denis P. O'Brien, ‘Classical Reassessments’, in W.O. Thweatt (ed.), Classical Political Economy: A Survey of Recent Literature (Boston: Kluwer, 1988), pp. 199–200.

15. Thor W. Bruce, ‘The Economic Theories of John Craig, A Forgotten English Economist’, Quarterly Journal of Economics, 52 (August 1938), p. 699.

16. Whately's biographer noted that Oxford ‘was one way, and Richard Whately the other. Oxford had resigned itself to Orthodoxy and Toryism and Whately was an inquirer and a liberal’. In W.J. Fitzpatrick, Anecdotal Memoirs of Richard Whately... (London, 1864), I, p. 56, quoted in Salim Rashid, ‘Richard Whately and Christian Political Economy at Oxford and Dublin’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 38 (Jan.-Mar. 1977), p. 148. In 1826, Whately anonymously published a rousing and controversial pamphlet, Letters of the Church, by an Episcopalian, calling for disestablishment of the Anglican Church, and separation of Church and state. Ibid.

17. The Rev. John McVickar, professor of political economy and moral philosophy at Columbia University, was moved to rewrite Whately's Easy Lessons for an American audience, in his own primer for children, First Lessons in Political Economy (1835).

18. Laurence S. Moss, Mountifort Longfield: Ireland's First Professor of Political Economy (Ottawa, 111.: Green Hill Pubs, 1976), pp. 39–42.

19. One English writer who adopted catallactics during this period was the pseudonymous Patrick Plough who, in the custom of the day, both introduced and explained the term within the title of his tract, Letters on the Rudiments of a Science, called, formerly, improperly. Political Economy, recently more pertinently, Catallactics (London, 1842). See Israel Kirzner, The Economic Point of View: An Essay in the History of Economic Thought (Princeton, N.J.: Van Nostrand, 1960), pp. 72–5.

20. E.R.A. Seligman, ‘On Some Neglected British Economists, V, Economic Journal, 13 (Sept. 1903), pp. 360–1.

21. Lloyd's ‘special utility’ was his term for what would later be called ‘marginal utility’; ‘abstract’ or ‘general’ utility would later be called ‘total utility’. See Seligman, op. cit., note 20, pp. 360–1.

22. Kendall was born to a Massachusetts farm family, and graduated from Dartmouth College in 1811 at the head of his class. He became a lawyer, and emigrated to Kentucky in 1814, where he functioned as attorney, editor and postmaster. He became editor of the important Frankfort (Ky) Argus in the capital of Kentucky, in 1814, and later became a leading Jacksonian brain-truster and postmaster-general.

23. Quoted in Gordon, op. cit., note 11, p. 384.

24. Bailey, however, did add a welcome methodological critique of James Mill's clumsy attempt to define away the increase of the value of wine through aging as some sort of mystical, vicarious expenditure of a year's worth of labour. As Bailey sardonically rebut ted Mill's assertion that the equivalent ‘labour may be correctly considered as having been expended’ on the wine: ‘a fact may be correctly considered as having taken place only when it really has taken place’. Colonel Torrens also provided a similar critique of Mill's labour theory.

25. Moss, op. cit, note 18, p. 67.

26. Ibid., pp. 68, 201.

27. Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk, Capital and Interest, Vol. I, History and Critique of Interest Theories (South Holland, 111.: Libertarian Press, 1959), p. 208.

28. Quoted in R. Warren James, John Rae: Political Economist (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1965), I, pp. 191–2.

29. Published in Senior's Outline of the Science of Political Economy (1836), cited in Marian Bowley, Nassau Senior and Classical Economics (1937, New York: A.M. Kelley, 1949), pp. 47–8.

30. It should be noted that, in this passage, Mill also made two exceptions to his assumed exclusive motivation of the desire for wealth: aversion to labour, and desire to consume at present. But he correctly added while these motives may conflict with the pursuit of wealth, they also ‘accompany it always as a drag, or impediment, are therefore inseparably mixed up in the consideration of it’.

31. Senior's use of the term ‘positive’ we would now say is ‘praxeologic’, his ‘hypothetical’ we would now say is broadly ‘positivist’.

32. Bowley, op. cit., note 29, pp. 63, 62n.