Philip Wicksteed

Philip Wicksteed

Born	25 October 1844(1844-10-25)
Died	18 March 1927(1927-03-18) (aged 82)
Nationality	Great Britain
Field	Economics
Alma mater	University College, London Manchester New College
Influences	Henry George William Stanley Jevons
Influenced	Joseph Schumpeter Henry Hazlitt Murray Rothbard

Philip Henry Wicksteed (25 October 1844 – 18 March 1927) is known primarily as an economist. He was also an English Unitarian theologian (son of a Unitarian clergyman), classicist, medievalist, and literary critic.

Wicksteed was educated at University College, London and Manchester New College. In 1867 he received his master's degree with a gold medal in classics. Following his father into the Unitarian ministry in 1867, Wicksteed embarked on an extraordinarily broad range of scholarly and theological explorations.

His theological and ethical writings continued long after he left the pulpit (in 1897), and appear to have been a starting-point for many of his other fields of scholarly inquiry. These included his interest in Dante, which not only produced a remarkable list of publications, but also built Wicksteed's reputation as one of the foremost medievalists of his time. It was Wicksteed's theologically-driven interest in and concern for the ethics of modern commercial society, with its disturbing inequalities of wealth and income, which appear to have led him into his economic studies (following on his reading of Henry George's 1879 Progress and Poverty).

Perhaps it was just by circumstance that economics entered Wicksteed's field of scholarly vision, as only one of a number of areas of his interest (to most of which he was committed for years before he began his economics) and in the middle of the fourth decade of his life. This led Joseph Schumpeter to remark that Wicksteed “stood somewhat outside of the economics profession”.

Yet, within a few years Wicksteed was to publish significant economic work of his own, carefully expounding on the theory he learned from Jevons, and to become for many years a lecturer on economics for the University of London Extension Lectures (a kind of adult-education program initiated in the 1870s to extend “the teaching of the universities, to serve up some of the crumbs from the university tables, in a portable and nutritious form, for some of the multitude who had no chance of sitting there”).

In 1894, Wicksteed published his celebrated An Essay on the Co-ordination of the Laws of Distribution, in which he sought to prove mathematically that a distributive system which rewarded factory-owners according to marginal productivity would exhaust the total product produced. But it was his 1910 The Common Sense of Political Economy which most comprehensively presents Wicksteed's economic system.

University College Library contains correspondence between Wicksteed's wife, Emily and Maria Sharpe Pearson, the wife of Karl Pearson (Helga Hacker papers, Box 11).

References

• Ian Steedman (1987). "Wicksteed, Philip Henry," The New Palgrave: A Dictionary of Economics, pp. 919–15.
• Philip H. Wicksteed (1910, 2nd ed., 1933, 2 v.,The Common Sense of Political Economy: Including a Study of the Human Basis of Economic Law, London: Macmillan.

- reprinted in 1933, L. Robbins, ed., Clifton NJ: Augustus M. Kelley Publishers

• ____ (1955) The Alphabet of Economic Science, New York City NY: Kelley & Millman, Inc.
• ____ (1914). “The Scope and Method of Political Economy in the Light of the ‘Marginal’ Theory of Value and Distribution”, Economic Journal, 24(94), pp. 1–23 (reprinted in Wicksteed, 1933).

External links

• The Common Sense of Political Economy, Vol. I and Vol. II

Persondata
Name	Wicksteed, Philip
Alternative names
Short description
Date of birth	25 October 1844
Place of birth
Date of death	18 March 1927
Place of death