5. Samuel Bailey and the Subjective Utility Theory of Value
In 1825, Samuel Bailey, 1791-1870, a rising young merchant from Sheffield, published a
thorough demolition of Ricardian value theory in his A Critical Dissertation on the Nature,
Measures and Causes of Value.
Bailey at last brought into English economics the subjective utility theory of the French
tradition.
Unfortunately, he was not gracious enough to acknowledge that fact.
While his essay was clearly in the Say tradition, for example, his brief and brusque references
to Say's treatise gave no hints of acknowledging his indebtedness.
But in any case, Bailey's demolition of Ricardo was devastating.
Beginning with Ricardo's definition of value as the relative price or purchasing power
of particular goods, Bailey went on to show the absurdity and inner contradiction of Ricardo's
claim that each good acquires an absolute and invariant value from the quantity of labor
hours embodied in its production.
For one thing, if the quantity of labor needed to produce good A remains the same, its value,
contra ricardo, can scarcely be invariable, if the quantity of labor embodied in other
goods B, C, D, etc. has changed.
In short, value is strictly relational, a ranking among goods, and therefore cannot
be absolute or invariant.
Furthermore, Bailey demonstrates that value is not inherent in goods at all, but is rather
always a process of subjective evaluation in the minds of individuals.
Value, as Bailey pointed out, in its ultimate sense, appears to mean the esteem in which
any object is held.
denotes, strictly speaking, an effect produced on the mind.
Value is purely a mental affection.
Furthermore, he profoundly states that value is not only a subjective estimation, but also
that valuation is necessarily relative among various goods or objects.
Value is a matter of relative preference.
Thus Bailey, When we consider objects in themselves without reference to each other, the emotion
or pleasure or satisfaction with which we regard their utility or beauty can scarcely
take the appellation of value.
It is only when objects are considered as subjects of preference or exchange that the
specific feeling of value can arise.
When they are so considered, our esteem for one object, or our wish to possess it, may
be equal to, or greater or less than, our esteem for another.
But if value is subjective and relative, or relational valuation, it follows that it is
absurd for Ricardo to hanker after an invariable measure of value.
In a scintillating and telling passage, Bailey displays the inner contradictions and absurdities
of any objective absolute theory of value, and specifically of the Ricardian quantity
of labor variant.
The Ricardians had lost sight of the relative nature of value and consider it as something
positive and absolute, so that if there were only two commodities in the world and they
They should both, from some circumstance or other, come to be produced by double the quantity
of labor.
They would both rise in real value, although their relation to each other would be undisturbed.
According to this doctrine, everything might at once become more valuable by requiring
at once more labor for its production, a position utterly at variance with the truth.
Real value denotes the relation in which commodities stand to each other as articles of exchange.
Real value, in a word, is on this theory considered as being the independent result of labor,
and consequently, if under any circumstances the quantity of labor is increased, the real
value is increased.
Hence the paradox, quoting from the devoted Ricardian Thomas de Quincey, that it is possible
for A continually to increase in value, in real value observe, and yet command a continually
decreasing quantity of B, and this though they were the only commodities in existence.
In sum, as Bayley pungently noted, the very term absolute value implies the same sort
of absurdity as absolute distance. Bayley then enters into a penetrating discussion
of the theory of measurement, showing the tremendous gulf between genuine measurement
of real or physical objects and any concept of measuring something as subjective and relative
as Human Valuation.
In the case of physical objects, such concepts as length or weight are measured by fixing
an invariant physical measure, such as a foot rule, and then comparing the length of other
objects in question with such a rule.
In human valuation, measurement is quite different.
It is simply the expression of prices or relative purchasing powers of different goods in terms
of one money or medium of exchange.
Here there is no physical operation such as measurement of physical objects.
In the case of money, there is a common expression or denominator of value in money rather than
an invariable physical object of comparison.
In fact, these prices or quantities are relative and variable, and there is no invariability
involved.
Indeed, Bailey would have done still better to abandon the term measure altogether and
to confine it strictly to the invariant standards used to compare physical objects, simply confining
In the course of demolishing the idea of an invariable measure of value, Bayley took deadly
aim at the notion that the value of money is invariant over time and therefore can be
Money used to compare general prices over time.
While the money commodity is not more fixed in value than any other, one of its attributes,
and one of the reasons it is chosen as money on the market, is its comparative steadiness
of value, as Bailey sensibly termed it in a later work on Money and its Value, Money
Money and its Vicissitudes in Value, 1837, but its value is not constant, and therefore
there is no way of measuring value over time.
But commodities only have value relations to each other at the same time.
A commodity has no value relation to itself at different times.
As Bailey puts it, we cannot ascertain the relation of cloth at one time to cloth at
another as we ascertain the relation to cloth in the present day.
All that we can do is to compare the relation in which cloth stood at each period to some
other commodity.
We cannot say that a pair of stockings in James I's reign would exchange for six-pair
in our own day, and we therefore cannot say that a pair in James I's reign was equal in
value to six pair now, without reference to some other article.
Value is a relation between contemporary commodities, because such only admit of being exchanged
for each other, and if we compare the value of a commodity at one time with its value
You at Another, it is only a comparison of the relation in which it stood at these different
times to some other commodity.
Until recently, historians have believed that Bailey's work made no impact on the Ricardian
world of British economics and fell into obscurity, only to be resurrected at the end of the 19th
by economists looking for forerunners of the marginal utility theory.
Actually, we now know that despite a vicious personal assault, probably by James Mill on Bailey and the Westminster Review,
Bailey's critical dissertation was widely read among economists and virtually swept the field.
In his January 1831 funeral rites for the Ricardian system before the Political Economy Club,
Colonel Robert Torrens declared that, as to value, Bailey's dissertation has settled that question.
Indeed, the year after Bailey's work was published, Torrens praised it highly in the third edition of his
his essay on the external corn trade, calling it in his preface a masterly specimen of perspicuous
and accurate logic, spearing that vague and ambiguous language in which some of our most
eminent economists have indulged.
And remarkably, the changeable torrent stuck to that estimate throughout his life.
In the lengthy introduction to his The Budget, 1844, in which he revised and retracted many
of his earlier views, Colonel Torrens went out of his way to affirm that the gifted author
of a dissertation on the nature, causes and measures of value has set finally at rest
the long agitated question whether value should be regarded as an absolute or positive quality
in Hearing in Commodities or as a Relation Existing Between Them.
Samuel Bailey wrote an effective reply to the Westminster Critic, a letter to a political
economist, 1826.
But apart from this and his money tract, most of his numerous writings dealt with philosophy
and with political reform.
For this prosperous Sheffield merchant, born into a mercantile family, founder and four-time
president of the Sheffield Literary and Philosophical Society, was in intellectual matters an ardent
Benthamite.
He devoted the bulk of his intellectual resources to Benthamite writings on philosophy and on
radical reform, and twice ran unsuccessfully on a reform ticket for parliament.
Bailey made a considerable philosophical impact with his first book, his Essay on the Formation
and Publication of Public Opinion, 1821.
The essay's emphasis on the utilitarian value of free discussion greatly influenced James
Mill, John Stuart Mills on liberty, and Francis Place.
In Economic Matters, Bailey's essay grounded economic activity in subjective mental phenomena
and explicitly rejected the emphasis of British classical economics on physical material objects.
The methodology of economics, Bailey maintained, was introspective of one's empirical surroundings.
Bailey saw economics as a science of mind rather than as technology. Clearly, his methodology
and philosophy of economics were far more Austrian than has been realized.
Bailey's later works were non-economic, including Essays on the Pursuit of Truth, 1844, The
Theory of Reasoning, 1851 and 1852, and three series of Letters on the Philosophy of the
Human Mind, 1855 to 1862.
His final publication was a two-volume book using etymology to rearrange and reinterpret
some of Shakespeare's plays.
From the Received Text of Shakespeare's Dramatic Writings and Its Improvement, 1862-1866
Samuel Bailey was the most important and influential subjective value theorist, but he was not
the first to bring subjective utility theory to 19th century Britain.
That honor belongs to the virtually unknown Scotsman John Craig, circa 1780 to circa
1850. All that we know about Craig is that he was a citizen of Glasgow and was a member
of the Fellowship of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, and yet nothing else is known about
his occupation or background. After writing a three-volume work on the elements of political
and Political Science, 1814, Craig made his striking, if unnoticed, contribution to economics
in his Remarks on some Fundamental Doctrines of Political Economy, 1821.
Craig not only brought utility into a British economics dominated by discussions of cost
and natural price, for the first time in Great Britain he brought value theory to the verge
Research of the Concept of Marginal Utility
Starting with the axiom that utility is the basis of all value, Craig proceeds to the
influence of supply.
Relative values of commodities may change, and those persons who happen to be possessed
of articles which are produced in larger quantities than formerly, or which from other circumstances
A truly notable passage that all of the broadcloth that in the estimation of purchasers was worth the former price had been formerly brought to market, and if more is now to be disposed of, it must be to those who did not reckon its utility equivalent to its former cost.
New purchasers indeed will appear in proportion to the reduction of price, because at every
step of the decline it is brought down to the estimate which an additional number of
persons had formed of its power of producing gratification, or in other words to their
estimate of its value in use.
Thus John Craig not only explicitly refuted the dominant Smithian view of the separation
of value in use from value in exchange, showing that the latter depended strictly on the former.
Even more important, Craig had captured the essence of the marginal utility doctrine without
the label, showing that as the quantity of a good increases, its price or value must
fall in order to tap a new group of purchasers whose utility estimate of the good had been
too low to allow them to purchase the good at the original higher price for the smaller
product.
In short, purchasers previously sub-marginal now become marginal for the additional product
as the price falls.
As Professor Thor Bruce declares, Craig appears on the very verge of expressing the idea of
marginal utility.
He broke away from the theory held by his contemporaries, which was based on the cost
idea and became the first exponent of the idea of the connection between utility and
value.
In thus emphasizing the utility theory, he was the forerunner of the Austrian School
of the Later Half of the Nineteenth Century Craig doesn't stop there.
If more broadcloth, for example, has been produced and its price has therefore fallen,
the previous purchasers now have surplus revenue which they will use to increase the demand
and therefore the price of other products.
Hence the fall in value of broadcloth will increase the demand and the price of other
goods.
Therefore, an increased supply of some goods does not necessarily lead to a fall in general
values, but rather to a restructuring of prices and to additional real income to consumers.
Craig concludes from his value analysis that exchange value not only depends on use value,
but is also an accurate measure of that value.
Craig points out in his introduction to the remarks that only after the body of his tract
was written did he come across J.B. Say's treatise and see the similarity in approach.
He adds, however, that Say's proper concentration on exchange value should have been amended
to point out that it is also the embodiment or expression of value in use.
Attacking the Ricardian labor or cost theory of value, Craig points out that the value
of any good is determined not by its cost of production, but by its demand and supply.
The demand varying continually in accordance with consumer desires, and the supply changing
according to the scarcity or abundance of its factors of production, as well as the
fertility of agriculture.
Or, as Craig put it, even if the cost were ascertained, it would not enable us to judge
of the exchangeable value.
Page value depends entirely on the proportion in the market which the demand for an article
may bear to the supply, a proportion ever varying on the one hand according to the plenty
or scarcity of capital or labor, and the fertility of the season.
If Samuel Bailey was preceded by John Craig, he was succeeded, six years after his dissertation,
by Charles Foster Cotterill in his An Examination of the Doctrine of Value, 1831. Cotterill
not only generally endorsed Bailey's subjective utility theory, he also pronounced the same
year as Torren's The Demise of the Ricardian Movement, noting bemusedly that there are
some Ricardians still remaining.
6. Nassau Senior, The Waitley Connection and Utility Theory
During the late 1820s, Nassau W. Senior delivered a series of lectures as Drummond Professor
at Oxford, some of which were collected in Senior's only published book, his Outline
of the Science of Political Economy, 1836.
Senior carried forward Bailey's Subjective Utility Theory.
How much he was influenced by Bailey is difficult to say, since, like all too many economists
of his era, Senior acknowledged virtually no like-minded colleagues or influences upon
his own work.
Senior did acknowledge J.B. Say, however, and began his value analysis by stating that
value depends on utility and scarcity, thus returning to the continental tradition.
Senior added that utility is relative to human desires and to different persons, and is not
intrinsic in objects.
Utility, he pointed out, denotes no intrinsic quality in the things which we call useful.
It merely expresses their relations to the pains and pleasures of mankind.
And as the susceptibility of pain and pleasure from particular objects is created and modified
by causes innumerable and constantly varying, we find an endless diversity in the relative
Relative utility of different objects to different persons, a diversity which is the motive of
all exchanges.
Scarcity, or the natural limitation of supply, was, for Senior, the main influence on relative
utility.
In the course of his discussion, Senior virtually came to formulate the law of diminishing marginal
utility.
Not only are there limits to the pleasure which the commodities of any given class can
afford, but the pleasure diminishes in a rapidly increasing ratio long before those limits
are reached.
Two articles of the same kind will seldom afford twice the pleasure of one, and still
less will ten give five times the pleasure of two.
While he was completing his studies at Oxford, young senior acquired as his tutor a young
man only three years older than himself, recently appointed as a fellow at Oriel College, from
which he had graduated several years earlier.
The Rev. Richard Waitley, 1787-1863, philosopher and theologian and son of an Anglican minister,
was to become Sr.'s close and lifelong friend.
Even though Sr. became an attorney, he remained a central part of the Oriel College circle
clustered around the charismatic Waitley.
The circle engaged in literary studies and pursuits, with Sr. publishing several literary
articles and launching a short-lived literary and intellectual quarterly, The London Review.
Wheatley published what was to become the standard text on logic, The Elements of Logic,
1826, in which Senior included an appendix on ambiguous terms used in political economy.
Indeed, Wheatley was probably responsible for injecting an unfortunate tendency in Senior
towards word-chopping and logomachy, which helped dampen the influence of the great Senior
in the World of Economics. At any rate, Senior learned philosophy and theology from Wheatley,
and the latter economics from Senior. In Oxford, the Oriel Circle was becoming a highly influential
center for liberal and Whig views within the Anglican Church, a remarkable influence indeed
in that traditionally high-Tory and high-church university. When the Drummond Professorship
Open Political Economy opened up in 1825, Wheatley secured the post for Nassau Senior,
and when Senior's term expired five years later, he recommended and obtained the position
for Wheatley as his successor.
Wheatley's Drummond Lectures, the introductory lectures on Political Economy, 1831, 2nd
Edition, 1832, continued and expanded the senior tradition, particularly in value theory.
Indeed, methodologically, Wheatley went further than senior. His linguistic and philosophical
interests led Wheatley to see that the concept and terminology of political economy tended
had to confuse and conflate these two distinct fields.
This confusion hindered the scientific development of economics.
Hence Waitley proposed substituting a new word, catallactics, the science of exchanges
for political economy.
Waitley defined man as an animal that makes exchanges, pointing out that even the animals
Wheatley's nearest to human rationality did not have to all appearance the least notion
of bartering or in any way exchanging one thing for another.
Focusing on human acts of exchange rather than on the things being exchanged, Wheatley
was led almost immediately to a subjective theory of value, since he saw that the same
and that differences in subjective value are the foundation of all exchanges.
Moreover, Waitley pointed out that labor is not essential to value, and noted that pearls do not fetch a high price because men have dived for them, but on the contrary, men dived for them because they fetch a high price.
Waitley saw that the economic realm, and particularly exchange activity on the market, deserved its own sphere of analysis and inquiry.
Even if integration later takes place, as analysis is applied to the political realm, there must first be a separation to allow the reasoning process its head.
But after separation and analysis, integration, and Richard Wheatley understood that the very
fact that a separate sphere was secured for catalactic analysis meant all the more that
integration with moral and theological analysis was required in order to come to policy conclusions.
In his Drummond lectures, Wheatley was concerned to show, first, that contrary to Oxford Tories,
political economy was not sinful, materialistic or opposed to Christianity.
In the first place, political economy is not to be considered, as had Smith and the Classicals,
a study of wealth.
It is instead a study of human exchanges.
And even a study of wealth is not sinful.
In the first place, it is not sinful per se to examine the means of increasing wealth.
There is no need for the political economist to step beyond his role as a scientist or
catallactician and advocate policy as a means of acquiring wealth or on any other grounds.
Indeed, once he does so, he advocates public policy, not as a political economist, but in some other capacity.
Waitley also denounced, in their turn, the attempt to monopolize economics by the aggressively atheistic, secular and anti-Christian Ricardian circle.
Certainly, the latter adjective would not be excessive for people like James Mill and the Benthamite radicals.
Wakely also believed Ricardian teachings to be dangerous and anti-Christian in the sense that they implied inherent class conflict between capital and labor, and between landlords and everyone else,
and, therefore, denied the essential laissez-faire insight of a harmonious social order, an order that testifies to the existence of divine wisdom.
In short, for weightily, laissez-faire harmony and Christian insight into a divine order meet on a broad integrative level.
Thus, while economic analysis is scientific and value-free, and cannot directly imply
political conclusions, such analysis will lead to laissez-faire conclusions, and as
such is perfectly consistent with Christian insight into a beneficent divine order.
In addition to his subtle exposition on the nature of and distinctions among positive
and Normative Economics, Wheatley denounced the naive fact-gathering methodology of the
Baconian Cambridge inductivists led by Richard Jones and William Hewell.
The role of fact-gathering, Wheatley perceptibly pointed out, was not in framing theory but
in applying it to specific conditions.
Looking at facts without the guidance of theory in their selection is virtually impossible.
Scientific advances, Waitley correctly noted, come not from gathering more data, but from
looking at old facts in new ways.
An example was modern insight into the nature of the circulation of the blood.
In 1832, Richard Waitley left his Drummond chair prematurely on getting a surprise appointment
to the high post of Anglican Archbishop of Dublin, where he scandalized the Evangelical
faithful by refusing to be anti-Catholic and by insisting on being joyous on the Sabbath.
The position of Archbishop carried with it being one of the two visitors of Trinity College
College Dublin, the two who formed the ultimate appeals court for all intra-college disputes.
Waitley used his clout at Trinity to drive through, over fierce opposition, the establishment
of a new chair of political economy at Trinity, under terms closely modeled on the Drummond
chair.
For the rest of his life, Waitley examined and selected candidates for the post himself
and Paid the Salary of the Professors.
The opposition from the Board and the Provost of Dublin University was based on a fear of
the alleged radicalism of political economy.
The Provost wanted weightily to guarantee that the holders of the new chair would have
sound and safe conservative views, to which the Archbishop indignantly replied that he
He was appalled at such a suggestion, involving, as it did, the introduction of party politics
into the subject of abstract science.
It was a subtle but important distinction that Waitley was trying to convey on an issue
that plagues academia to this day.
He was saying that it was proper, indeed important, to select a professor with the correct view
are two of the broader implications of his subject, as well as of its strictly scientific aspects.
Yet, it was decidedly not proper to judge the professoriate on the basis of their direct positions on narrow political issues,
which Waitley lumped together as party politics.
Thus, in gaining agreement on the Waitley chair, the Archbishop closely quizzed
He selected the professors on the basis of their commitment to the Christian liberal view of the harmony of the universe in general and of the free market in particular, and to the senior subjective utility theory of value as against the Ricardian labor theory.
Wheatley himself wrote a bit more on economics, reiterating his ideas in his Easy Lessons on Money Matters for the Use of Young People, 1833, an enormously popular work for children that went into 15 editions in the next 20 years and was translated into many languages.
Remarkably, in this primer, Wheatley hinted at another huge theoretical advance, generalizing
the theory of pricing for all factors of production.
If you consider attentively what is meant by the words rent, hire and interest, you
will perceive that they all in reality signify the same sort of payment.
But unfortunately, Wheatley did not apply himself further to economics, and insights
into value or distribution theory became scattered and fragmentary.
From now on, he would have to rely on Wheatley chair holders to pursue the subjective tradition
more systematically.
The first holder of the Wheatley chair suited the Archbishop's requirements admirably.
Samuel Mountaford Longfield, 1802-1884, the son of an Anglican vicar in County Cork, Ireland,
had graduated from Trinity College a decade earlier and had won a gold medal in science
for particular excellence in mathematics and physics.
Longfield later won a coveted fellowship at Trinity, a post-concentrating on mathematics
Science and Sciences, areas in which Trinity was far stronger than Oxford and Cambridge,
which were just now enlarging their exclusively classical curriculum to enter the modern world.
While serving as fellow of the college, Longfield entered Dublin Law School and, graduating
in 1831, became assistant to the Dublin Professor of Feudal and English Law.
Not only that, Longfield delivered a series of public lectures on the common law that
was highly favorably received.
Mountaford Longfield more than fulfilled Waitley's expectations.
Not only did he use the leisure and the stimulus of the chair to hammer out a remarkably complete
subjective and even marginalist theory of value and distribution, a genuine alternative
to Ricardianism. He also imparted his stamp and the tradition of a subjective value theory
alternative on Dublin University, leaving worthy successors to his chair.
The brunt of Longfield's system was presented in his first published series of lectures,
Lectures on Political Economy, 1834. During the rest of his term, Longfield published
and two more sets of lectures.
In 1836 he left the Wheatley Chair to resume his legal career, becoming Regis Professor
of Feudal and English Law at Dublin University.
Later he became a member of the Queen's Council.
Longfield was an expert in real estate law, and in 1849 he was appointed as one of the
three land commissioners in Ireland.
A decade later, he became the prestigious judge of the landed estates court in Ireland.
From then on, he was known widely in Great Britain as Judge Longfield for his efforts
on behalf of land reform in Ireland.
Aside from a few articles on banking, Longfield had no further leisure to pursue economic
studies and so his remarkable contributions to economics were crammed into his four years
in the Wheatley Chair.
At the end of his life, Longfield returned to his early interest in mathematics, publishing
a mathematical text, an elementary treatise on series, in 1872.
Longfield's broad perspective of market harmony was quite similar to Wheatley's.
In his lectures, he wrote that the laws according to which wealth is created, distributed and
Consumed have been framed by the great author of Our Being with the same regard to our happiness
which is manifested by the laws that govern the material world.
Furthermore, Longfield was disturbed by Ricardo's pessimistic theory of distribution and his
portrayal of inherent class conflict between workers, capitalists and landlords, with the
The former two being doomed by an inevitable rising lion's share of the product accruing
to the unproductive class of landlords.
In value theory, Longfield worked out the subjective theory of value and price more
fully than had been accomplished before in Great Britain.
He concentrated firmly on market price as the important consideration rather than long-run
and Price, and also showed that both are in any case determined by supply and demand.
Longfield broke important new ground in his detailed marginal analysis of demand.
Here he worked out the concept of consumer demand as a schedule related to sets of prices,
and even developed the idea of individual falling demand schedules as the fundamental
Basis of Aggregate Market Demand.
Even more fully than John Craig, Longfield showed that market demand curves are constituted
by a spectrum of supramarginal, marginal and submarginal buyers, each with different intensities
of demand.
Furthermore, the measure of the intensity of any person's demand for any commodity is
is the amount which he would be willing and able to give for it, rather than remain without
it, or forgo the gratification which it is calculated to afford him.
Yet, of course, despite the different intensities of demand, all exchanges will be at the same
market price.
If then the price is attempted to be raised one degree beyond this sum, the demanders,
Who by the change cease to be purchasers, must be those the intensity of whose demand
was precisely measured by the former price.
Thus the market price is measured by the demand, which being of the least intensity, yet leads
to actual purchases.
In short, the marginal demand becomes a key to the determination of price.
In his analysis of supply, Longfield showed that the supply relevant to the real day-to-day
market price is a previously produced stock of a good now fixed for the immediate present
period.
In short, what would now be called a vertical supply curve for the immediate market period.
Furthermore, Longfield saw clearly, in contrast to Ricardo, that cost of production in no
No sense determines price. At most, it contributes indirectly to that determination by affecting
the extent of supply. His analysis comes close to the later Austrian theory by brilliantly
pointing out that the effect of cost on supply comes from the expectations of producers in
deciding how much of a good to make and put on the market. Thus the cost of production
Man acts by its influence on the supply, since men will not produce commodities unless with
the reasonable expectation of selling them for more than the cost of producing them.
Professor Lawrence Moss, a biographer of Longfield, has deprecated the latter's contribution to
value theory as not a marginal utility theory.
Mises complains that while Longfield realized that utility was the source of all demand,
he did not analyze utility beyond that, and stuck merely to an analysis of marginal demands
and the demand schedule.
This revisionist view seems merely to quibble over terms.
While Longfield did not use the term marginal utility, or break utility down into individuals
or Groups. His doing so for demand and the degrees of demand goes most of the way towards
a complete utility theory. Professor Moss is in danger of mistaking the term for the
substance. It is true, however, that an unfortunate lingering Ricardianism led Longfield to endorse
labor as a measure of value, a concept which is every bit as fallacious as the labor theory
of Value itself.
In Ireland, as we shall see, Mountafort Longfield, aided by Wheatley, left an important legacy
of subjective value theory and anti-Ricardianism to his successors in the Wheatley chair at
Dublin.
But unfortunately, he had no influence in England, where he was ironically well known
Known as Judge Longfield, the Irish land reformer, and unknown as an important and challenging
economist, Senior, though closest in doctrine, knew of Longfield, but only referred to him
once on a trivial point and displayed no signs of being influenced by him.
This neglect was intensified by the extreme provinciality of English economics in the
of the 19th Century. Generally, they would not deign to notice foreign writers, especially
colonials, like Irishmen and Americans, from whom they might have profited.
But Mountafort Longfield did succeed, at least, in establishing a utility value tradition
in Ireland. His successor in the Wheatley Chair, Isaac Butt, 1813-1879, proudly called
He called himself a disciple of Longfield, and advised his students to read, above all
in economics, Longfield, Say and Senior, a worthy trio indeed.
Like Longfield, and even more so, Butte's economic contributions were confined to the
1836 to 1840 term of his weighty chair, his most important publications, Introductory
Theory Lecture, 1837, and Rent, Profits and Labor, 1838, consisting of lectures delivered
at Trinity.
As we shall see below, Butt's main contribution was generalizing Longfield's marginal productivity
theory of factor pricing and integrating Say's utility analysis with that theory.
in utility theory proper, but corrected Longfield's Smith-like error in referring to consumption
per se as unproductive, but also noted that the labor theory of value might be in a sense
applicable if labor were the only scarce resource, and if, moreover, it were homogeneous and
costlessly mobile between industries. But such conditions are, of course, impossible.
Isaac Butt began as a precocious classical scholar and translator of Virgil. He was named
to the Wheatley Chair at the early age of twenty-three, and while teaching there he took
his bar examinations. After his term was over, Butt became an eminent attorney and soon became
Isaac Butt denounced British policy during the Irish Famine and went on to become a famous and hard-hitting advocate of Irish Home Rule.
Butt defended leaders of the Irish Rising of 1848 in court, as he did the Fenian rebels in the late 1860s.
in the 1960s. Butt was also the founder, leader and chief organizer of the Home Rule Party,
serving for a while in Parliament. His published writings after his Trinity period dealt with
the Irish land question, where Butt advocated land reform on behalf of the Irish tenentry.
As a tenants advocate, Butt took the poorly paid side of these legal disputes, and hence
was never well off and was often deeply in debt. His main publications on the Irish question were
A Voice for Ireland, The Famine in the Land, What Has Been Done and What Is to Be Done, 1847,
and The Irish People and the Irish Land, 1867.
Isaac Butt's successor in the Wheatley Chair, James Anthony Lawson, 1817-1887,
Lawson was also an attorney involved with the Irish Question, but he took the opposing route
to but, becoming a stern advocate of British law and order and suppression of his rebellious
countrymen.
Lawson also became the holder of the political economy chair at a remarkably early age, 24,
serving the full term from 1841 to 1846.
Lawson entered parliament and rose to become solicitor general and then attorney general
for Ireland, becoming a judge of the common pleas in 1868.
There he meted out punishment for land rebels and Fenians.
While Richard Cantillon remains as the only possibly murdered man in history of economic
Lawson's productivity in economics followed the same restricted path as that of his predecessors.
His only published book was his Five Lectures on Political Economy, 1844, consisting of
some of his Trinity lectures.
In later years he occasionally printed some of his lectures on legal topics, the best
known being on mercantile law in 1855.
Unfortunately the series of Lawson's lectures on value have been lost, his only published
reference to them being contained in a brief appendix to his five lectures.
We know enough, however, to see that Lawson was decidedly in the Trinity utility tradition,
and even made a distinguished contribution to that doctrine.
Thus Lawson declared that it was subjective utility and utility alone that determined
the price of all goods.
Lawson declared that it is a proposition always true and of universal application that the
exchangeable value of all articles depends upon their utility, that is, upon their power
or to gratify the wants and wishes of man.
All other attempted explanations of value he saw as only partial.
Demand and supply, for example, can only influence price by way of their effect on utility.
In dealing with the effect of an increase of supply, Lawson arrived flatly and notably
at the law of diminishing marginal utility.
Thus, if someone's supply of a good increased, this will generally diminish its utility to him, or the degree in which he desires its possession, for as our particular desires are capable of being satisfied, it is obvious that we may have more of an article than we wish to use, therefore retaining the possession of that surplus is less desirable to us.
When coming to the cost of production theory of value, Lawson pointed out that the utility of a product and not its cost determines how much anyone will pay for it.
While price may sometimes equal cost of production, this does not mean that cost determines the price.
Studies.
On the contrary, the coinciding of cost and price, Lawson added, can only come about through
the medium of a change in supply, and when this cannot be brought about, there is no
such coincidence and no tendency toward it.
In that way, Lawson arrived at Stanley Jevons' newly hacked book.
In his five lectures Lawson also developed the Wakelian idea of economics as catallactics,
as the study of exchanging man.
In his first lecture Lawson declared that economics views man in connection with his
fellow man, having reference solely to those relations which are the consequences of a
particular act to which his nature leads him, namely the act of making exchange.
In his second lecture, Lawson fails of political economy as the study of wealth.
The next holder of the Wheatley Chair, William Nielsen Hancock, 1820-1888, a student of Wheatley
at Oxford, taught at Trinity from 1846 to 1851 and was also an attorney.
He was a particularly scholarly lawyer, and in the last two years of his trinity term,
he simultaneously held the chairs of Jurisprudence and Political Economy at the new Queen's College,
Belfast. Afterwards, Hancock was a secretary to many government commissions on land and
education matters, and held posts as court clerk, ending his career as clerk of the Crown
in Dublin.
He was the principal founder of the Statistical Society of Ireland in 1847 and the Social
Inquiry Society of Belfast four years later.
In contrast to the other Trinity chairholders, Hancock was interested in statistics and
impurity too, with a first in mathematics.
He published a host of articles and pamphlets on empirical questions.
Lawell dealt, almost inevitably, with the Irish land question, where, like Longfield
and Butt, but unlike Lawson, he championed the rights of the Irish tenantry and deplored
the effect upon their condition of the British imposed system of land tenure.
For example, the Tenant Right of Ulster, 1845, Impediments to the Prosperity of Ireland,
1850 and Two Reports for the Irish Government on the History of the Landlord and Tenant
Question in Ireland, 1859 and 1866.
Other pamphlets dealt with taxation and local government, in which he advocated a single
tax on income, including the inheritance of wealth.
A third group of articles advocated stricter control and supervision of the savings banks.
Hancock's statistical work was done under the influence and guidance of Thomas Larkham,
a land surveyor and statistician who filled many government posts, becoming undersecretary
for Ireland in the 1850s.
While better known for applied economics, Hancock did publish a valuable theoretical
Work, 1848-1849
where the exchange takes place.
He proposed then to use the word price exclusively instead of exchange value.
Price furthermore can change either from the side of things or from the side of money.
Treating the former, he notes that such changes can only take place as a result of one or
both of the following causes.
Whether a change in the degree in which its possession is desired, or in its desirability,
or a change in the force of the causes by which its supply is limited, or in other words,
by which it is made scarce, turning to demand, Hancock added that the degree in which the
possession of a commodity is desired is measured by the number of persons able and willing
Banking to Purchase at Each Amount of Price.
Hancock's utility or quasi-marginal utility analysis emphasized a slightly different aspect
than did that of his predecessors, namely another aspect of what we would now call the
falling demand curve, for he noted that it is observed that for commodities in general
Their desirability increases very rapidly as their prices fall.
On supply Hancock again stressed limitations of supply rather than cost, and the limitations
or scarcities of supply are dependent on the scarcities of the various factors of production.
He implied that the returns to these factors is a question of their prices, and that any
Any explanation of the prices of the factors must treat them uniformly, in accordance with
the influences upon their demand and supply, that is, by the application of the laws already
stated with regard to other prices.
But while Hancock was clearly in the Trinity utility tradition, we see already a falling
Going Back, a Loss of Interest and a Greater Vagueness in the Discussion of Value, or indeed
of Theory in General.
And indeed, William Nielsen Hancock was destined to be the last of the distinguished line of
Irish Subjective Utility Theorists at Trinity College.