ABSTRACT
W. Bagehot contrasts the continuing worldly success of Adam Smith’s economics with the indifferent reputation of political economy in the 1870s. The essay, like its companion The Preliminaries of Political Economy, is a defensive undertaking. It tries to mitigate the claims of political economy in order to make them more effective. In the context of the general reappraisal of economics that was going on in the 1870s, Bagehot’s two essays sound optimistic and the Political Economy Club’s celebrations positively complacent. A theme which in the 1870s both linked and divided economists was the need to propagate the subject more effectively. The soil in which nineteenth-century English economics grew was liberal and utilitarian. Yet the correlation between deductive economics and autonomous economics, though strong, is not so obvious that it should be taken for granted. Marxist economics, after all, violates the correlation.
