Sidgwick, Henry
Sidgwick, Henry
Henry Sidgwick (1838-1900), English economist, does not have an obvious place in the standard histories of economic or social thought. His name is not associated with any particular theory or policy, and much of his influence was exerted through his teaching and his participation in the affairs of Cambridge University.
Sidgwick was born at Skipton in Yorkshire, where his father was an Anglican clergyman and headmaster of the local grammar school. From his earliest years it was clear that Sidgwick was destined for academic success. After attending Rugby, he went to Cambridge and achieved distinction there, both in classics and mathematics. In 1859 he was elected to a fellowship at Trinity College; he remained at Cambridge for the rest of his life.
At the beginning of his academic career Sidgwick taught classics, but he was soon drawn into the field of social science and in 1867 exchanged his lectureship in classics for a lectureship in moral sciences (what would now be called social sciences). Much of his intellectual effort as a teacher at Cambridge was directed toward improving the curriculum: he was influential in raising the status of the social sciences, and he helped pave the way for the economics tripos. Thus, he may be regarded as one of the pioneers who facilitated the emergence of the “Cambridge school” of economics. He also furthered the cause of university education for women (his wife became principal of Newnham College in 1892), and he played a part in the movement for greater religious toleration at the university.
His writings ranged over a number of fields: in addition to his early classical studies, he wrote on politics, philosophy, and economics and, more remote from his central concerns, attempted to make research on psychic phenomena (then a particular vogue in England) scientifically respectable. All who came in contact with Sidgwick seem to have agreed about his intellectual and moral stature; Marshall spoke of him as his “spiritual father and mother,” and John Neville Keynes described him as the most intellectually gifted man he had ever met.
Sidgwick’s written contributions to economics are to be found mainly in his Principles of Political Economy (1883). This work is a useful bench mark by which to judge the state of the discipline in the period between J. S. Mill’s Principles (1848) and the first edition of Marshall’s Principles (1890). The text is primarily a re-exposition of Mill, with traces of the emergent marginalism of Jevons and Marshall. Like Marshall, Sidgwick had a strong desire to emphasize continuity in economic thinking, rather than his own originality. As he put it, “The special aim ... is to eliminate needless polemics by a guarded restatement of traditional doctrines, with due recognition of the advances made in economic theory by recent writers” ([1883] 1901, p. ix). The book contains some corrections and clarifications of Mill’s analysis (for example, the distinction between movements along a demand schedule and shifts from one demand schedule to another, which is so blurred in Mill, is clearly made and explained by Sidgwick), and the influence of Marshall is obvious.
The most important sections in Sidgwick’s Principles are those dealing with methodology and the analysis of government interference. Sidgwick restated the methodological position, first enunciated within the context of economics by Senior and Mill, whereby the “science” and the “art” of political economy are to be logically differentiated: “The first gives information as to what happens, without pronouncing whether it is good or bad; the second judges that what happens or would happen under certain conditions is the best thing that could happen” (ibid., p. 36). However, Sidgwick (ever a moderate) refused to adopt the extreme position of Cairnes, and later of Robbins, according to which the economist qua economist has no special qualifications in the normative area of his studies.
The core of Sidgwick’s major contribution is contained in his discussion of the art of political economy (book 3). He was at pains to dissociate economic science from the political doctrines of laissez-faire and suggested various conditions under which state interference in the productive process may become desirable: one important condition is the divergence of private and social benefits. Here Sidgwick’s analysis constitutes the prototype of the Marshall-Pigou approach. However, he did not present a general a priori case for government ’ interference whenever this divergence obtains—each situation has to be considered on its own. He stated the case for interference with the distribution of income—necessitated by an unregulated economic system—with much more generality, except for reservations about the possible effects of interference on production. He argued for much greater equality of income, to be achieved by deliberate government fiscal policy, basing his argument on the “general acceptance” of two propositions of Bentham’s, which may be summarized as follows: utility increases as wealth increases, but at a decreasing rate. Sidgwick did not make clear the methodological status of these propositions; we are not told whether they are judgments or testable (and tested) hypotheses.
Sidgwick’s influence on social thought and policy is difficult to assess. Although he expressed grave doubts about the feasibility of a total socialist solution, his rejection of any general theoretical reasons for nonintervention and his emphasis on the need to look at every case individually place him squarely in the English Fabian tradition.
Bernard Corry
[For the historical context of Sidgwick’s work, see the biographies ofMillandSenior; for discussion of the subsequent development of Sidgwick’s ideas, see the biographies ofMarshall and Pigou.]
WORKS BY SIDGWICK
(1874) 1901 The Methods of Ethics. 6th ed. London: Macmillan.
(1883) 1901 The Principles of Political Economy. 3d ed. New York: Macmillan.
(1891) 1908 The Elements of Politics. 4th ed. London: Macmillan.
SUPPLEMENTARY BIBLIOGRAPHY
Keynes, John Neville 1900 Henry Sidgwick [obituary]. Economic Journal 10:585-591.
Keynes, John Neville (1908) 1963 Henry Sidgwick. Volume 3, pages 757-759 in Robert Palgrave, Palgrave’s Dictionary of Political Economy. New York: Macmillan.
Marshall, Alfred (1890) 1961 Principles of Economics. 9th ed. 2 vols. New York and London: Macmillan.
Mill, John Stuart (1848) 1965 Principles of Political Economy, With Some of Their Applications to Social Philosophy. 2 vols. Edited by J. M. Robson. Collected Works, Vols. 2, 3. Univ. of Toronto Press.
Sidgwick, Arthur; and Sidgwick, Eleanor 1906 Henry Sidgwick: A Memoir. London and New York: Macmillan.