ABSTRACT
During the 1870s English political economy suffered a considerable loss of public prestige. Confidence in the Ricardian ‘laws’ was undermined by bitter controversies between leading economists such as that which resulted from John Stuart Mill’s recantation of the wages-fund theory in 1869, and the belief that the received doctrine was disintegrating found supporting evidence in Jevons’ scathing attack on the Ricardian theory of value.2 On the occasion of the dinner given by the Political Economy Club of London to mark the centenary of The Wealth of Nations it was suggested that the economists ‘had better be celebrating the obsequies of their science than its jubilee’.3 The nadir of this movement was reached in 1877, when it was formally proposed that Section F of the British Association, dealing with Economics and Statistics, should be dropped because its proceedings and its subject matter were unscientific.4
