ABSTRACT
In Britain public discussion of political economy and economic issues was during the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries something that for the most part took place in print. The suppression of Jacobin and revolutionary clubs in the mid-1790s had deterred respectable literary and philosophical societies from debating matters bearing on politics, a taboo which lasted well into the post-war period; public discussion of political economy, it was thought, might all too readily become socially divisive, or even seditious. When in 1821 the Political Economy Club (hereafter: PEC) formed in London it was a dining club limited to thirty members. Discussion was therefore conducted behind closed doors and between a select group of elected members and their guests. Not until the 1830s did respectable people moot the possibility of systematically diffusing political economy through open meetings, by which time the movement for social and political reform had once more established itself in the mainstream of public life. These restrictions did not apply however to the publication of pamphlets and books or, with the foundation of the Edinburgh Review in 1802 (Fontana 1985; Fetter 1965), to periodicals which reviewed recent books. Later in the century the work of political economists appeared in literary publications such as the Fortnightly Review, emphasising the lasting importance of general periodicals for an educated reading public in the dissemination of the work of Jevons (1876) and Cairnes (1872), for example. In addition to this, the Journal of the Statistical Society of London regularly published papers related to economic affairs, where of course the focus was upon practical and policy matters, and not the development of economic theory. For political economy was widely understood in the early nineteenth century to be a practical, rather than a theoretical, science.
