ABSTRACT
William Cunningham’s academic mission was to establish economic history as an independent discipline. His ideological mission, in his daughter’s words, was to rescue English thought and English politics from ‘the a-moral and a-national prejudices of Liberal economics and Whig history’. By making the seller displaying his goods the key figure in the economic process, Cunningham believed that he — or someone else — could make an empirical study of the determination of price in different classes of transaction, which would yet take full account of what was good in the orthodox theory. Cunningham began by endorsing working-class distrust of quantitative economics. Thus Cunningham’s criticism of ‘the science in its most recent form’ cannot be taken to mean that he thought his economist contemporaries should, in their role as economists, be making ethical judgements. Cunningham regained his pedagogic freedom in 1888.
