Philip Wicksteed

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Philip Henry Wicksteed (25 October 1844 – 18 March 1927) is known primarily as an economist. He was also an English Unitarian theologian (son of a Unitarian clergyman), classicist, medievalist, and literary critic.

Wicksteed was educated at University College, London and Manchester New College. In 1867 he received his master's degree with a gold medal in classics. Following his father into the Unitarian ministry in 1867, Wicksteed embarked on an extraordinarily broad range of scholarly and theological explorations.

His theological 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 in Dante, which not only produced a remarkable list of publications, but also built Wicksteed's reputation as one of the foremost medievalists of his time. It was Wicksteed's theologically-driven interest in and concern for the ethics of modern commercial society, with its disturbing inequalities of wealth and income, which appear to have led him into his economic studies (following on his reading of Henry George's 1879 Progress and Poverty).

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 led Joseph 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 from Jevons, and to become for many years a lecturer on economics for the University of London Extension Lectures (a kind of adult-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 celebrated An Essay on the Co-ordination of the Laws of Distribution, in which he sought to prove mathematically that a distributive system which rewarded factory-owners according to marginal productivity would exhaust the total product produced. But it was his 1910 The Common Sense of Political Economy which most comprehensively presents Wicksteed's economic system, and which expresses most clearly and emphatically those insights which today's Austrians find congenial.

Important elements of this “Austrian” side of Wicksteed's work were concisely presented by him in his 1913 Presidential Address to Section F of the British Association, published in Economic Journal, March 1914, under the title “The Scope and Method of Political Economy in the light of the ‘Marginal’ Theory of Value and Distribution”.

University College Library contains correspondence between Wicksteed's wife, Emily and Maria Sharpe Pearson, the wife of Karl Pearson (Helga Hacker papers, Box 11).