Philip Wicksteed | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Born | (1844-10-25)25 October 1844 Leeds, England |
| Died | 18 March 1927(1927-03-18) (aged 82) Berkshire, England |
| Parent(s) | Charles Wicksteed (father) Jane Wicksteed (mother) |
| Academic background | |
| Alma mater | University College London Manchester New College |
| Influences | Henry George William Stanley Jevons |
| Academic work | |
| Discipline | Economics |
Philip Henry Wicksteed (25 October 1844 – 18 March 1927) was an English scholar andUnitarian theologian known for his contributions to classics, medieval studies and economics.[1][2] He was also aGeorgist andliterary critic.[3][4]
Philip Henry Wicksteed was the son ofCharles Wicksteed (1810–1885) and his wife Jane (1814–1902), and was named after his distant ancestor,Philip Henry (1631–1696), theNonconformist clergyman and diarist.[5]
His father was a clergyman within the same tradition ofEnglish Dissent. His mother was born into theLupton family, a socially progressive, politically active dynasty of businessmen and traders, long established inLeeds, a city both prosperous and squalid with the rapid growth of theIndustrial Revolution. In 1835 Wicksteed had taken up the ministry of the Unitarian place of worship,Mill Hill Chapel, right onthe city's central square, and two years later the couple married. In 1841 his sister Elizabeth married Jane's brother Arthur (1819–1867), also a Unitarian minister; Uncle Arthur was, according to a family history, "TheAchilles of the Leeds Complete Suffrage Association",[6] in other words, a tragic champion of the fight foruniversal suffrage; seeChartism andHenry Vincent for more on the CSA. One of their children, a first cousin to Philip, was the maverick MP and mining engineerArnold Lupton. Jane was described as impractical but accomplished (sketching, painting, reciting poetry etc.) and both the Wicksteed siblings as "Unitarians of vigorous mind and keen intelligence".[7]
Philip was one of nine children, including Janet, who wrote, as Mrs Lewis, a memoir including her parents;(Joseph) Hartley, president of theInstitute of Mechanical Engineers;[8] andCharles, also an engineer.[9] One of his nieces was Mary Cicely Wicksteed, who married the prominent Australian surgeon SirHibbert Alan Stephen Newton (1887–1949)[10]
Wicksteed was educated atUniversity College London andManchester New College, the seminary for nonconformist ministers. In 1867 he received his master's degree with a gold medal inclassics. Following his father into theUnitarian ministry that year, Wicksteed embarked on an extraordinarily broad range of scholarly and theological explorations.
Histheological and ethical writings continued long after he left the pulpit (in 1897), and appear to have been a starting point for many of his other fields of scholarly inquiry. These included his interest inDante,[11] which not only produced a remarkable list of publications, but also built Wicksteed's reputation as one of the foremostmedievalists of his time. Inspired by his reading ofHenry George's 1879 bookProgress and Poverty,[12] Wicksteed's theologically driven interest in the ethics of modern society, appear to have led him into his economic studies.[13]
Perhaps it was just by circumstance that economics entered Wicksteed's field of scholarly vision, as only one of a number of areas of his interest (to most of which he was committed for years before he began his economics) and in the middle of the fourth decade of his life. This ledJoseph Schumpeter to remark that Wicksteed "stood somewhat outside of the economics profession".
Yet, within a few years Wicksteed was to publish significant economic work of his own, carefully expounding on the theory he learned fromWilliam Stanley Jevons, and to become for many years a lecturer on economics for theUniversity of London extension lectures (a kind ofadult education program initiated in the 1870s to extend "the teaching of the universities, to serve up some of the crumbs from the university tables, in a portable and nutritious form, for some of the multitude who had no chance of sitting there").
In 1894, Wicksteed published his celebratedAn Essay on the Co-ordination of the Laws of Distribution, in which he sought to prove mathematically that adistributive system which rewarded factory owners according tomarginal productivity would exhaust the total product produced. But it was his 1910The Common Sense of Political Economy which most comprehensively presents Wicksteed'seconomic system. The 1932 work byLionel Robbins,An Essay on the Nature and Significance of Economic Science, picked up and developed his ideas.
Wicksteed married Emily, a daughter ofHenry Solly, a Unitarian minister and social reformer.[14] The library ofUniversity College London contains correspondence between Emily andMaria Sharpe Pearson, the wife ofKarl Pearson.[15]
Wicksteed was a staunch opponent ofvivisection. He became an associate ofFrances Power Cobbe and supported the anti-vivisection movement.[16]
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