Talk:Richard Whately
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I think there should be more in the article on Richard Whately concerning his work as an economist (although the article as it now stands does give a link to Whatley work on the subject).
Only two points would need to be made. That he thought "economics" (household management) was a poor name for the matters that the subject deal with - suggesting the name "catallactics" (the study of exchanges between people) instead. And that he rejected Ricardo's Labour Theory of Value, holding economic value to be a subjective matter (not determined by the amount of labour used to create a product).
[What I write from now on would not need to be included in the article (it is just, I hope, of interest).]
Whilst some of Adam Smith's writings support a labour theory of economic value and this gave support to the theory that David Ricardo later developed, it is often forgotten that most economists outside the English speaking world in the early 19th century, and many English speaking economists (such as Whately) rejected the labour theory of value. The story implied in the old text books (that before the work of Jevons, Menger and Walras in the early 1870's everyone went along with the labour theory of value) is simply wrong. Although (oddly enough) there was (in the English speaking world) a revival of support for the labour theory of value in the middle years of the 19th century. J.S. Mill's father James Mill had always supported his friend Ricardo and J.S. Mill's influence led to the revival of support for the theory.
I sometimes ponder what would have happened had Richard Whately remained an academic in Oxford (rather than becomming Arch Bishop in Ireland). I strongly suspect that Whately would have strongly opposed the work of J.S. Mill - and not just in economics. J.S. Mill's inductivist logic is in stark contrast to Whately's Aristotelianism.
J.S. Mill's works on Political Economy and on Logic were the best selling works on these subjects in mid Victorian Britain and they were very influential among students - but they might not have been so influential if Whately had been on hand to write refutations (as his own works on political economy and logic show him well qualified to do) or to inspire students or young lecturers to do so.
Founding a Chair in Political Economy in Trinity College Dublin is all very well, but it is not the same as full time work in a university. Indeed some of the later holders of this Chair (after Whately's death) wrote lectures that actually supported the labour theory of value. "Here is some money, set up a Chair" is never as good as doing the work oneself.
Paul Marks.
I copied in some text from New School HET page Robertsch55 08:48, 30 March 2007 (UTC)
[edit] WikiProject class rating
This article was automatically assessed because at least one WikiProject had rated the article as start, and the rating on other projects was brought up to start class. BetacommandBot 04:24, 10 November 2007 (UTC)
