Pioneers of Modern Economics in Britain

It is arguable that William Stanley Jevons has a better claim to the title ‘pioneer of modern economics’ than any of his British contemporaries. Forty-two years ago Keynes described Jevons’s Theory of Political Economy as ‘the first treatise to present in a finished form the theory of value based on subjective valuations, the marginal principle and the now familiar technique of the algebra and diagrams of the subject’.¹ The Theory of Political Economy undoubtedly succeeded in doing what Jevons, equally undoubtedly, intended it to do — to mark a sharp break with all previous presentations of the principles of the subject. As a result it gained him a sharply-defined place in the history of economic thought as one of the initiators of what has come to be called the Marginal Revolution. Yet at the same time this very success has tended to overshadow the rest of Jevons’s economic writing and to some extent prevented a balanced assessment of his achievements as an economist from becoming generally known.

The main facts of Marshall’s life are well-known, and are set out in the very fine account given by Keynes who worked from material supplied by Mrs Marshall.¹ Alfred Marshall was born on 26 July 1842. Rebelling against a parental preference for classics and the Church, he went to St. John’s College, Cambridge, read mathematics, and graduated as Second Wrangler in 1865. A period spent as a Fellow of St John’s led him to economics and to marriage with Mary Paley, one of the pioneer women undergraduates at Cambridge. The years 1877–82 were spent at Bristol University College, chiefly as its principal. After a short spell at Oxford, Marshall was elected to the Chair of Political Economy at Cambridge, taking up the post in January 1885 and holding it until his retirement in 1908 when he was followed by his chosen successor A. C. Pigou. Greatly revered as the leading economist in the Anglo-Saxon world he died on 13 July 1924.

Francis Ysidro Edgeworth¹ was born on 8 February 1845 in Edgeworthstown in County Longford, Ireland. The family name had in fact been taken from Edgeworth (now Edgeware) in England, where the family settled in the reign of Elizabeth I. Since that time, however, the family has declined in size and the male line has become almost extinct. Richard Lovell Edgeworth, the head of the family in the eighteenth century, had 4 wives and 22 children.² One of these children was the novelist Maria Edgeworth (1767–1847), who was friendly with Ricardo and Bentham,³ and who was described by Edgeworth as ‘a very plain old lady with a delightful face’.⁴

Those of us who went up to Cambridge in the late 1950s remember Pigou as an eccentrically clad, unapproachable figure sitting in a deck chair on the grass of the front court of King’s. At that time he refused to discuss economics and was reputed to read only comics and ‘shockers’. Sartorial disarray was not, in Pigou’s case, merely a product of old age for Marshall had complained to C. R. Fay, many years before: ‘Fay, I do wish you’d speak to Pigou on a personal matter — a rather delicate matter. I saw him coming out of Bowes’ shop in a Norfolk jacket with holes in both elbows. So bad for the Economics Tripos!’¹ Pigou’s various eccentricities, closely linked to his shyness, had their attractive and unattractive aspects. He had a great sense of fun, particularly in his earlier years. Corrie reports

If every one of his friends recounted their amusing recollections of the Prof it would fill a volume … the remarkable thing about the Prof was the rapidity with which he could relax from serious work and plunge with boyish enjoyment into any sort of hair-brained [sic] scheme.²

Arthur Lyon Bowley¹ was born on 6 November 1869 in Bristol. The family had settled there five years earlier when his father, James William Lyon Bowley, was appointed vicar of St Philip and St Jacob, Bristol. They originated from London where James was born in 1826. He first took employment in a smith’s shop, then as a clerk in a drapery and in 1846, after much private study, was appointed as assistant master at a Totteridge school. He clearly had great reserves of energy and self-discipline (qualities his son inherited) for once installed in his teaching position he furthered his quest for greater learning by early morning study of the classics.

There is little doubt that Robertson would be somewhat flattered, and perhaps even amused, to find himself regarded as a pioneer of economics. He always regarded Alfred Marshall as being the explorer, the advance guard in economics, paving the way for the troops to follow. He thought of himself as one of the more disciplined troops, keeping to the Marshallian tradition and anxious to prevent his fellow troops, particularly J. M. Keynes, from breaking ranks. Yet Robertson was able to lead the troops in one important direction in which Marshall had rarely sought adventure¹ — in the development of a theory of industrial fluctuation. Commenting upon the subject matter of fluctuation, money, credit and employment, Robertson wrote: ‘this has always been to me the most interesting part of economics — the only part to which I can hope to be remembered as having made any personal contribition’.² This erroneously omits his contribution to economics over a wide range of subjects, particularly in the field of international trade and the theory of the firm;³ but in truth such contributions are small in relation to that which Robertson gave to the study of industrial fluctuation.

The career of Ralph George Hawtrey spanned the first three-quarters of this century. He came to public attention in 1897 when his article in the Fortnightly Review attacked British naval procedures and brought his father the congratulations of Gladstone.¹ He remained active on the public scene through 1970 when a final letter to The Times criticised the conduct of monetary policy and reiterated arguments from his last book, Incomes and Money, published but three years before. During the many years between, Hawtrey combined the career of a senior civil servant in the Treasury with that of an important theorist in monetary economics.²

Aristocratic in temper and origins; physically, morally and intellectually fearless; clear and incisive in thought; the embodied principle itself of following the logic where it leads; the soul of scholarly generosity; Friedrich August Hayek is one of the outstanding sculptors of this age’s thought. He was born on the 8 May 1899 into a family academically distinguished on both sides. At the University of Vienna he gained two doctorates, becoming Dr. jur. in 1921 and Dr. rer. pol. in 1923. From 1927 till 1931 he was Director of the Austrian Institute for Economic Research. In 1931 as visiting lecturer at the London School of Economics he gave the lectures which were published in that year as Prices and Production ¹ and which gained for him, in those days of baffled debate about the causes of the great depression which had struck the industrialised world like a plague, his first sensational prominence. In that year he was appointed Tooke Professor of Economic Science and Statistics in the University of London. He held this Chair until, in 1950, he moved to Chicago. In 1962 he was appointed Professor of Economic Policy at the University of Freiburg, and in 1974 he was made honorary professor at the University of Salzburg. In 1944 he had been given an honorary Doctorate of Science by the University of London, and in that year also he was elected a Fellow of the British Academy.