ABSTRACT
This comment considers the significance of two interrelated matters which arise from the wide-ranging discussion in Bob Coats’s chapter. The first concerns the ways in which John Neville Keynes and Alfred Marshall responded to the charge, emanating in part from Oxford, that political economy lacked ‘humanity’ and that economic and social issues required a more humanistic or less individualistic approach which took account of ethical concerns. One component of the Cambridge response was to announce a divorce between economics and moral philosophy, thereby breaking any link between economics and specific ethical doctrines such as utilitarianism. The rejection of the latter doctrine introduces the second aspect for discussion, which is focused here on William Stanley Jevons, consideration of whose work Coats put to one side. The relevance of Jevons in this context is that his utilitarian political economy was a particular target for Keynes and Marshall Both criticised the use of ‘hedonics’ (i.e. psychological hedonism) which underpinned the marginal utility theory in Jevons’s Theory of Political Economy. In considering how the declared break with moral philosophy was linked to the criticism of depicting behaviour in terms of hedonics, I suggest that the Cambridge critique was in part a response to the perceived hostility directed at economics by two different audiences. The first was the Oxford-style critics considered by Coats. The second, which was just as important for Marshall, was the organised, ‘respectable’ working class.
