Richard Whately (1787-1863) followed his pupil Nassau Senior as the second Drummond Professor of Political Economy at Oxford13. Whately accepted the Chair in 1829 because of recognition of the growing importance of political economy and its potential usefulness in Christian apologetic. To an unnamed correspondent he wrote “Religious truth ... appears to me to be intimately connected at this time especially with the subject in question [political economy]. For it seems to me that before long, political economists of some sort must govern the world... Now the anti-Christians are striving very hard to have this science to themselves, and to interweave it with their own notions” (Whately 1886 p66-67). According to Waterman (1991a p10-11) political economy was seen to be “hostile to religion”, and was used by Bentham and James Mill to promote “their own unashamedly atheistic program of reform”. “It was the single-handed achievement of Richard Whately to defeat the philosophical radicals by showing that a defensible demarcation is possible between scientific and theological knowledge, thereby insulating each from illegitimate encroachment by the other” …“by safeguarding the integrity of each, it validated the ideological alliance of political economy and Christian theology that Malthus and his colleagues attempted to create”.
Whately saw no conflict between political economy and religion, suggesting in his inaugural lecture “that Political Economy should have been complained as hostile to religion will probably be
regarded in a century hence with the same wonder, almost approaching to incredulity, with which we of the present day hear of men’s having opposed on religious grounds the Copernican system” (Whately 1832 p25).
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An earlier signal of the importance Whately placed on political economy was his invitation to Nassau Senior to contribute an addition to the appendix to his Logic (Whately 1826) on definitions in political economy, commencing “The foundation of Political Economy being a few general propositions deduced from observation or from consciousness, and generally admitted as soon as stated” (p230). This work offers a vision of a deductive political economy where the pressing need is to clarify definitions of key terms.
Whately revealed in correspondence that he was thinking “of making a continuation of Paley’s
Natural Theology, extending to the body-politic some such views as his respecting the natural” (Whately 1886 p66-67). Such project is consistent with his proposed deductive approach, although as we will see later in the chapter Jones and Whewell regarded it as dangerous.
Although prefigured in his review of Senior’s Drummond Lectures, Whately’s project of extending the design argument to society began in his own Introductory Lectures on Political Economy. “In nothing perhaps will an attentive and candid inquirer perceive more of the divine wisdom than in the provisions made for the progress of society” (Whately 1832 p84). He then illustrates this by describing the remarkable way a city like London of a million inhabitants can be supplied each day, observing that “no human wisdom directed to that end could have conducted so well the system by which that enormous population is fed from day to day” and that this bears “the same marks of contrivance and design, with a view to beneficial end, as we accustomed to admire (when our attention is drawn to them by the study of Natural Theology) in the anatomical structure of the body etc” (Whately 1832 p90). He draws an analogy between the circulation of blood and the circulation of commodities, but observes the latter is more wonderful because it is not the circulation of inert matter but circulation induced by rational free agents with a variety of motives (Whately 1832 p91). The conclusion to which he is led is that “Man, considered not merely as an organised being, but as a rational agent, and as a member of society, is perhaps the most wonderfully contrived, and to us the most interesting specimen of divine wisdom that we may have knowledge of” (Whately 1832 p91).
Whately makes no particular analytical economic contribution in developing this argument, and leans heavily on Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations. Whereas Smith was reticent about linking the idea of unintended benefits of self-interest in a market economy to the doctrine of providence, Whately is explicit: “Man is, in the same act, doing one thing by choice, for his own benefit, and another, undesignedly, under the care of Providence, for the service of the community” (Whately 1832 p94).
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In one of his later works there is an even stronger providentialist reading of Smith “You will have observed that it is as a writer on the evidences of natural and revealed religion that I consider Paley to be especially eminent. Though there is nothing of his that is not worth an attentive perusal, I would place Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments and Wealth of Nations (though not regarding either as infallibly right throughout) higher than Paley’s works on the same subjects” (Whately 1859 p39). As was noted in chapter 4we may have doubts about Smith’s intentions, but there is no doubt that the dominant interpretation of the Wealth of Nations in the years when political economy took shape was providentialist and natural theological.
Whately’s concern for educating the poor in sound principles in political economy was clear during his time as Archbishop of Dublin, the appointment which followed his tenure in the Drummond Chair at Oxford. He established the Whately Chair of Political Economy at Trinity College Dublin in 183214. More important for the general public were his hugely popular Easy Lessonson Money Matters (Whately 1833) written for schoolchildren15 because "next to sound religion, sound Political Economy was the most essential to the well-being of society." and that "the sort of thing wanted most now for children and the poor, is some plain instructions in Political Economy".
In relation to the problem of reconciling Malthus’ principle of population with the power and goodness of God, Whately referred his readers to Sumner’s Treatiseon the Records of Creation but added his opinion that a satisfactory account cannot be given of this problem of the existence of evil, and that it is a problem which “we more and more perceive to be the only difficulty in
theology” (Whately 1832 p96). This suggests that despite the efforts of Malthus, Paley and Sumner one of the core ideas of political economy, the principle of population, created insoluble difficulties for natural theology.
4.POLITICAL ECONOMY AT CAMBRIDGE:RICHARD JONES AND WILLIAM