Disturbing elements in the study and teaching of political economy

Preface

The following lectures were delivered in the Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, April 25- 29, 1910, to the Economic Seminary, at whose desire, by the courtesy of the University, they are now printed.

As the title suggests, they are discourses not on economic error in general, but on the more subtle fallacies which are apt to invade the reasoning of trained economists in spite of learning and discipline.

Such errors creep in from a popular political philosophy (Lecture I), from want of any political philosophy (II), from mistaken aversion to theory (III), from the shortcomings of common or technical language (IV), and from the wrong handling of distinctions of time (V).

That the course of the reader may be smoother, the needful notes are confined to an Appendix.

Ottawa, December, 1910.

Contents

PAGE PREFACE vii

Lecture I

Lecture II

II Page

30. 'David Hume.' First Principles of Government, 1741.

31. 'Struggle of J. S. Mill.' Unsettled Questions, last

esssay, on Definition and Method (dating from 1836).

33. 'Used indifferently' — like the words habit and cus-

tom; the former strictly of the individual, the latter of the group.

34. Sir William Temple's Works, 4th ed., 1720, Vol. I,

45. 'Professor Patten's language.' Dynamic Economics,

1892. Social Statics is the name of a book by Herbert Spencer (1850), and the term occurs in Comte's Philosophie Positive, 1839. See J. S. Mill, Pol. Ec. IV, I.

46. 'Without doing what Bacon told us.' 'State super

48. 'L'homme aux quarante 6cus.' The minister's answer to the wiseacre was : 'I declare you exempt from the tax.' 'Second best faculty.' So Mill says in his Autobiography (p. 82) : "The writings by which one can live are not the writings which themselves live and are never those in which the writer does his best." ' A good saying of Mill's, ' Liberty, p. 148.

52. 'Collective wisdom,' Aristotle, Politics, III, 6. Carlyle. Latter Day Pamphlets, e.g., I and VI.

Ill

PAGE

59. 'The proof of the pudding.' Professor Stout's words in Mind, 1907, p. 581.

61. 'Sanely and wisely,' J. N. Keynes: Scope and

Method of Political Economy, Macmillans, 1891.

62. 'Too practical,' Ricardo's Letters to Malthus, p. 96,

66. "The late Henry Sidgwick." The writer had the privilege of publicly expressing this obligation to Mr. Sidgwick himself at the Banquet of the British Economic Association, 28th March, 1900.

74. ' Professor Hollander, ' Quarterly Journal of Economics (Harvard), January, 1895.

77. 'Minor economists,' J. R. McCulloch, Henry Fawcett. In this case W. N. Senior takes side with Ricardo and Malthus, the major economists.