II Some Cambridge Economists

William Paley (1743-1805)

A.M.C. Waterman

Introduction

Though traces of ‘economic thought’ in Cambridge may be detected as early as the 1770s, the earliest example to appear in print is contained in William Paley’s The Principles of Moral and Political Philosophy (1785), which brought its author instant fame and fortune. On the strength of its Book VI, Chapter XI, Maynard Keynes conjectured that ‘Perhaps, in a sense, he [rather than Malthus] was the first of the Cambridge economists’ (Keynes 1933 [1972]: 79, fn. 2; italics in original).

William Paley (1743-1805) was a Yorkshire man and was mildly derided at Cambridge for speaking Latin with a Yorkshire accent. He was the son of a clergyman and Cambridge graduate who became Master of Giggleswick School. The biographical information that follows is adapted from Waterman (2011).

I acknowledge with gratitude the generous assistance of Mr Nicholas Rogers, archivist of Sydney Sussex College, Cambridge University, for giving me access to the Hey Archive and for transcribing material from volume III of Hey’s ‘Lectures in Morality’. I also wish to acknowledge permission from Oxford University Press to make unrestricted use of Waterman (1996), much of which is incorporated in sections 3 and 4 of this chapter. Also, I am very grateful to Dr Neil Hitchin for showing me his as yet unpublished report on Paley’s lecture notes, which include detailed notes of the lectures on ‘Moral Philosophy’ made by W. Thomas, son of Hugh Thomas, Master of Christ’s during Paley’s tenure as a Fellow and an undergraduate student of the College from 1774 to 1779.

A.M.C. Waterman (h)

Fellow of St John’s College, Winnipeg and Professor Emeritus of Economics,

University of Manitoba, Canada

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© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017 209

R.A. Cord (ed.), The Palgrave Companion to Cambridge Economics,

DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-41233-1_10

Paley was born in Peterborough in July 1743 where his father, the Reverend William Paley, was a minor canon of Peterborough before his appointment to Giggleswick in 1745, upon which the family returned to Yorkshire. Like his father, the younger William went up to Christ’s College, Cambridge, where he matriculated in 1759, graduating BA in 1763 as Senior Wrangler, meaning that his was the highest performance of all Mathematical Tripos candidates in that year. After three years of school teaching in Greenwich, he was elected Fellow of Christ’s in 1766 and ordered deacon. In 1767, he was ordained priest and graduated MA. He was awarded the Doctor of Divinity degree in 1795 for his Evidences of Christianity (1794), which remained on the reading list for ‘Little Go’ (Cambridge Previous Examination) until the 1920s.

For 10 years after his election as Fellow, Paley occupied various college offices and played a large part in teaching undergraduates. At that time, this was almost entirely conducted in the colleges by college lecturers and tutors. The few university lectures delivered by a small handful of professors were optional and scantily attended. But college classes were compulsory. All undergraduates faced a common curriculum designed to prepare the next generation of clergymen, magistrates, and legislators for their public duties in a Christian society: the Latin and Greek classics supplemented in some colleges by biblical languages and literature, and some reading in ‘moral and political philosophy’. Many undergraduates went down after one or two years of this, and most of those who remained in residence received the ordinary BA without examination, after keeping the requisite number of terms.

A small minority of ambitious students who needed to make their way in the world, and who were usually of relatively humble origins, sought an honours degree and competed in the Tripos examinations. These consisted of five public disputations in Latin, using Aristotelian logic, on theses acceptable to the Moderators. However, by the middle of the eighteenth century, the oral tests were supplemented by a written ‘Senate House Examination’ in mathematics—the first written examinations in any university of the Western world. Candidates for honours therefore supplemented their other studies with Newtonian ‘natural philosophy’ and mathematics.

Paley was soon known throughout Cambridge as a superb teacher, and many students came from other colleges to attend his lectures. A much later commentator wrote of Paley’s ‘utter inability to be obscure’ (Annan 1984: 244). In all probability, Paley taught the entire curriculum with the exception of the classics, in addition to mathematics and natural philosophy for Tripos candidates in Christ’s College.

In 1776, 10 years of hard work—with the assistance of patronage— brought its reward. Paley was preferred to the rectory of Great Musgrave, Westmorland. Thus, at last he was able to marry, resigning his Fellowship as was then required. His wife, Jane Hewitt of Carlisle, bore him ten children, two of whom died in infancy. He remained in the diocese of Carlisle for the rest of his career, on terms of cordial friendship with his mentor, patron, and ecclesiastical superior, Edmund Law, Bishop of Carlisle (1768-1787), who had been a Fellow of Christ’s in the 1730s, and Master of Peterhouse and Knightsbridge Professor of Philosophy when Paley was a young man. Paley’s energy and efficiency soon led to his promotion as Archdeacon (1782) and Chancellor (1785). But he also held benefices later in the dioceses of Lincoln and Durham, and in 1796, he moved to Bishop Wearmouth in Durham whilst remaining Archdeacon of Carlisle. He was exemplary in parochial and diocesan duties, active in promoting education of the poor, and a leader in the campaign to abolish the slave trade. He also advocated tithe reform and supported independence for the American colonies. His first wife having died in 1791, he married Catherine Dobson of Carlisle in 1795. Paley died on 15 May 1805 after a lingering and painful illness, during which he completed his last book, Natural Theology (1802). He is buried in Carlisle Cathedral.

Paley’s daughter, Mary, was grandmother to Mary Paley (1850-1944), who was among the first five women to enter Newnham College when it opened its doors in 1875. She read for the Moral Sciences Tripos and married her economics instructor, Alfred Marshall.

Soon after leaving Cambridge, Paley was urged by his bishop and other friends to write up his college lectures for publication. He began with Moral and Political Philosophy (1785), a spectacular success for which his publishers paid ?1,000—more than Malthus was to earn from all his books in a lifetime. It was almost at once adopted as a required text for all undergraduates at Cambridge, went through 20 English editions by 1814 (15 in Paley’s own lifetime) and 10 American editions by 1821. In the USA, it remained ‘the most popular text on moral philosophy from the 1790s to the Civil War’ (Haddow 1939: 67). Though long superseded as a textbook, its sparkling lucidity still had appeal for the discriminating in the twentieth century: ‘If anyone will take up again Paley’s Principles, Keynes declared in 1933, ‘he will find, contrary perhaps to his expectation, an immortal book’ (Keynes 1933 [1972]: 79, fn. 2).

The first five books of Principles are concerned with moral philosophy: obligation and duty—to God, to our neighbour, and to ourselves. Book VI contains ‘Elements of Political Knowledge’, with chapters on government, obedience and civil liberty, the British constitution, the administration of justice, and religious and military establishments.

Since there can be no obligation to do that which is unfeasible, moral and political philosophy must entail some positive investigation of the economic and social circumstances to which normative principles apply. Therefore an element of what we now call ‘economic analysis’ is always to be found, implicit or explicit, in almost all expositions of political philosophy at least since Plato’s Republic. What we might think of now as Paley’s ‘economic thought’ was neither ‘political rnconomy’ in the sense of either Sir James Steuart or Adam Smith nor ‘economics’ as later conceived by his great-grandson-in-law. It is entirely contained in the penultimate chapter of Principles, Book VI, Chapter XI: ‘Of Population and Provision’, which, though only one out of 88 chapters, is long and complex and comprises 8% of the entire text.

What follows consists of three parts. Much of the material, especially in the second and third parts, is adapted from Waterman (1996), some of it verbatim:

First, an examination of Paley’s method of thought: the intellectual context of mid-eighteenth-century Cambridge in which it emerged including such evidence as there is of economic thinking by his Cambridge contemporaries; his individualist, proto-utilitarian view of society; and the possible influence of other eighteenth-century authors such as Bernard Mandeville, David Hume, George Berkeley, Steuart, and Smith.

Second, a formalisation of Paley’s implicit demand-led, two-sector macro model: the stability of its equilibrium and the possibility of comparative statics, its generalisation of Mandeville’s Fable of the Bees, its explicit recognition of what is perhaps the first example of optimisation in economic thought; and other economic topics in ‘Population and Provision’.

Third, a consideration of what may have led Keynes, writing in the early 1930s when his own economic thinking was in flux, to be so impressed by Paley’s analysis, and to think of him as ‘the first of the Cambridge economists’.