ABSTRACT
J S MILL'S ADMIRERS: J E CAIRNES AND HENRY FAWCETT
J E CAIRNES
Introduction
During his lifetime J E Cairnes became recognised as the leader of British academic economists.(!) In The Character and Logical Method of Political Economy published in 1857, a year after he won the Whately professorship, he attempted to return economics to its first principles and defended the 'science' against the attacks of its critics.(2) He offered a precise and clear exposition of the province and method of economics from the viewpoint of Ricardo and Mill, and urged that political economy was concerned with what is, not with what ought to be. Unfortunately, the science of political economy had suffered from the intrusion of alien elements represented by "considerations of equity and expediency".(3) To Cairnes, political economy was to be regarded as:
••• standing neutral between competing social schemes; neutral as the science of mechanics stands neutral between competing plans of railway construction, in which expense, for instance, as well as mechanical efficiency, is to be considered; neutral as chemistry stands neutral between the competing plans of sanitary improvement; as physiology stands neutral between opposing systems of medicine. It supplies the means, or more correctly, a portion of the means to identify itself with any.(4)
In Cairnes' view it was necessary to limit economics to a science of wealth that was above policy. Economics should be neutral between different plans of social organisation as mechanics was between different plans of railway construction.(5) He categorically stated that economic laws were rules deduced from "human nature and external facts", not "from the statistics of society, or from the crude generalisation of history".(6)
Furthermore, Cairnes noted that compared to a physicist, an economist had one distinct advantage - "a knowledge of ultimate causes" which centred around the behaviour of economic man and
consisted of "uncertain mutual feelings and beings".(7) The proof of an economic law must rest on an appeal to certain principles of human nature, operating under certain physical conditions.(&) Cairnes argued that political economy was a deductive science with empirical premises and so long as the premisses were empirical the hypothetical procedures were satisfactory.(9) When conclusions arrived at by deduction were contradicted by statistical evidence, then there had to be underlying tendencies which accorded with the conclusions.(!O) As Mark Blaug argues, Cairnes' concern was to warn against those who "would bend economics to political purposes, who would condemn it because it stood for laissez faire and who would refute its abstract principles by factual evidence".(!!)
In The Slave Power (1862) which he dedicated to J S Mill, Cairnes applied his deductive methodology when he endeavoured to predict from the known effects and causes of slavery the future pattern of events.(l2) He systematically examined and deduced the economic influences of slavery on the course of civilisation, remarking that just as an "anatomist might be able from a fragment of a tooth or bone to determine the form, dimensions and habits of the creature to whom it belonged", so might "a political economist, by reasoning on the economic character of slavery and its peculiar connection with the soil deduce its leading social and political attributes, and almost construct, by way of a priori argument, the entire system of the society of which it forms the foundation".(l3) His "Essays Towards a Solution to the Gold Question" are characterised by a similar exhibition of the working of a principle amid a mass of facts.(l4) He traced "the consequences which would result from the increased supplies of gold which were pouring into the world from the mines of California and Australia".(l5)
Perhaps Cairnes' most important work was his final publication - Some Leadin Princi les of Political Econom Newly Ex ounded (1874 - which is often regarded as the last statement of the classical system of ideas.(l6) The work is highly theoretical and consists of three broad areas: an analysis of normal and market values; an analysis of supply and demand; and a discussion of the theory of the wages fund or of "average aggregate wages".(!?) Leading Principles chiefly sought to correct Mill's heresies on free trade, socialism and the wages-fund doctrine. Cairnes' defence of free trade was more categorical than that of Mill, and he completely rejected Mill's heresies on reciprocity and protection asserting that free trade was both sound for Britain's particular circumstances and was theoretically unimpeachable as a true principle of scientific economics.(!&) In the Leading Principles, Cairnes did not expound the Malthusian doctrine on wages, since his earlier works had comprehensively covered the topic.(l9) He believed that it was sufficient to note "the influence of Mr Darwin's great work, in which ••• the tendency of human beings to increase faster than subsistence ••• was shown to be surely a particular instance of a law pervading all organic existence". He added that the objection to the Malthusian
doctrine had "for some time come to an end".(20) However, in defending the wages-fund doctrine, Cairnes explained away a great deal of the theory.(21) He emptied the doctrine of almost all its earlier content, so much so that Jevons considered Cairnes had abandoned it.(22)
Cairnes' Leading Principles was the last formal attempt to justify the arguments of the classical economists. In the preface he stressed that his work should not be viewed "in any sense as antagonistic in its attitude towards the science built up by the labours of Adam Smith, Malthus, Ricardo and Mill •.• On the contrary, my hope is that it willshould its reasonings find acceptance - strengthen, in some sensible degree, and add consistence to that fabric".(23) However, in reality, Cairnes further exposed the contradictions within the Ricardian structure and denied economics its social applicability and utility.(24) Though a great admirer of J S IV!ill, Cairnes shared "some of the doubts and uncertainties of the critics of orthodoxy".(25)
Principles of Political Economy and the Empire
Occasionally Cairnes applied the principles of political economy to the empire and cited events in, and evidence from, the self-governing colonies to support and verify the principles.
