Introduction
History has not been kind to Bonamy Price; a detached alien, a genial nonentity, holding back the development of mid-to-late-nineteenth-century economics in Oxford. He left no great oeuvre, in the manner of Mill or Marshall, but rather, like Nassau Senior, collections of lectures and a notable volume of articles covering churchmanship, constitutional questions, education and political economy, albeit that many were recycled.
A man slightly out of his time, a classicist and mathematician, more inclined to the former, and a sceptic of applying a scientific method to something where he thought enlightened common sense should prevail. A prospective reformer of tradition in Oxford tuition who, nonetheless, left no great mark on its teaching.1 Yet he was often quoted as an authority in the Parliament of his day, and his death was widely reported across the English-speaking world.He was closest to the English Historical School of Economics, but not quite congruent. Certainly, he rejected the Ricardian and the scientific/math- ematical approach of the Marginalists, but he was neither historical nor statistical in his approach. Adam Smith was his constant touchstone. So, whilst to some extent he continued in the vein of his predecessor in the Drummond
1 To be fair, most Oxford reforms since the seventeenth century had come largely from external pressures rather than internal movements.
R. J. Bigg (*)
Retired Scholar and Author, Newbery, UK
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 R. A. Cord (ed.), The Palgrave Companion to Oxford Economics, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-58471-9_9
Chair, Thorold Rogers, his advantage to the electors was his innate conservatism compared to Rogers' growing radicalism. Rogers would, however, be reelected to the Chair on Price's death in 1888.
As the entry on Price in Palgrave's original Dictionary noted: ‘An economist, interesting for the independence of his views, and for the spirit with which he expounds them.
The animating principle of his writings is, that for an economist, practical instincts are more needed than speculative ability' (Mozley 1899: 188). A far harsher verdict was given by Coats: ‘Oxford economics lacked an effective intellectual leader, for the professor of political economy from 1868 to 1888 was Bonamy Price, a genial nonentity who denied that economics was a science and asserted that it was merely a practical, common-sense subject employing rule-of-thumb methods and enunciating familiar truisms' (Coats 1967: 714).In examining the development of the later nineteenth century Oxford group of younger economists (Ashley, Cannan, L.L. Price, et al.), Kadish notes that Bonamy Price ‘seems to have left no noticeable impression... He is not mentioned in any of their biographical works as a source of inspiration' (Kadish 1982: 172). Perhaps, asks Kadish, the younger economists had little contact with Price, as most Oxford teaching was done through the college lecturers, or perhaps in a wide variety of areas their points of disagreement were either trivial or of limited interest and relevance. Price himself often balanced both sides of an argument, rarely taking an outspoken position, whilst his belief in the underlying unity of interest between the economic classes would not have been in conflict with the views of this younger generation. Perhaps then he was not worth attacking nor referencing as support. Kadish also notes that Price's main interests of currency and banking did not attract a great deal of interest in Oxford.
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