ABSTRACT
In a lecture as the first Drummond Professor of Political Economy in
Oxford, given during the academic year 1825-1826, Nassau Senior
presented an outline of his own subject which emphasised the great gulf
between the old and new:1
Political Economy was an art long before it was a science. . . . Those
who first practised it in modern Europe . . . those who first endeavoured
to employ the powers of government in influencing the production,
distribution and consumption of wealth, were semi-barbarous
sovereigns, considering their subjects not as a trust, but a property
to the best and readiest account. Their advisers were landholders,
merchants and manufacturers, each anxious only for his own and
immediate gain, and caring little how the rest of society might be
affected by the monopoly he extorted. From the mode in which these
persons pursued what they thought their individual interests, aided by
national jealousy, and by the ambiguities of language, and selected by
any sound principle, were that unhappy expound of theoretical and
practical error, the mercantile system.
