The modern reputation of Henry Sidgwick is that of a later nineteenth-century Cambridge moral philosopher, whose 1874 Methods of Ethics is a landmark text in the consideration of the moral foundations of human action:
whether there were any general principles governing how one should act. This is the view of modern philosophers, among whom Sidgwick’s stock has been rising in recent years; but the scope of Sidgwick’s work and influence is greater than this reputation might suggest.
As Knightbridge Professor of Moral Philosophy at Cambridge from 1883 until his death in 1900, Sidgwick was chiefly responsible for the Moral Sciences Tripos, the tripos on which Alfred Marshall taught from 1885 until the establishment of his own, Independent Economics Tripos in 1902. Most of the young men that Marshall regarded as his brightest students - Sydney Chapman (1898), Alfred Flux (1889), Joseph Shield Nicholson (1876), D.H. Macgregor (1901) and of course A.C. Pigou (1900) - were products of the Moral Sciences Tripos, which was the means through which Marshall created the first generation of Cambridge economists. Sidgwick also wrote a substantial treatise on political economy, Principles of Political Economy (1883), which inter alia laid the foundations for Pigou’s welfare economics and introduced the conception of externalities. Further, in 1891 he published The Elements of Politics, building upon Bentham and Mill. And so, in later nineteenthcentury Cambridge, Sidgwick represented philosophy, politics and economics, all rolled into one.Henry Sidgwick was born in Skipton, West Riding, on 31 May 1838, the fourth of six children of the Reverend William Sidgwick, headmaster of Skipton Grammar School. William Sidgwick, a graduate of Trinity College, Cambridge, died in 1841, after which the family moved away from Skipton, Henry being schooled privately. In 1852 Henry entered Rugby School, his mother also settling nearby in 1853, so that Henry lived at home with his family until he entered Trinity College in October 1855. Also living with them at Rugby was Edward White Benson, a cousin of William Sidgwick, a young master at Rugby, a future Archbishop of Canterbury and also, after marrying Henry’s younger sister Mary in 1859, his brother-in-law.
In 1876 Henry himself married Eleanor Balfour, sister of Arthur Balfour, a former pupil of Henry and one of the first students to be examined in the reformed Moral Sciences Tripos of 1876, a Conservative Member of Parliament from 1875, and Prime Minister from 1902 to 1905 of the Conservative government that broke on the issue of tariff reform. Henry Sidgwick died on 28 August 1900 of cancer, his death giving rise to numerous tributes testifying to the widespread respect he commanded.He had entered Trinity College in 1855, graduating in 1859 with firsts in both Classics and Mathematics. In the same year he had been appointed to a college lectureship in Classics at Trinity College, but during the early 1860s he read widely in philosophy, theology and languages, entertaining the possibility of making himself eligible for one of the two chairs in Arabic at Cambridge. By the mid-1860s this strategy was abandoned and he focused his attention on the one chair for moral philosophy, the Knightbridge chair. In 1869 he exchanged his Assistant Tutorship in classics for a College Lectureship in moral philosophy, orienting himself to the Moral Sciences Tripos as reformed by John Grote. Also, since John Grote had died in 1866, Sidgwick came to represent the tripos in Cambridge, especially following his appointment to the Knightbridge Chair in 1883.
The shift from classics to moral philosophy in 1869 was associated with Sidgwick’s growing doubt in the status of the truths enshrined in the 39 Articles, embodying the principles of Anglican faith which all college fellows had to profess. Maynard Keynes notoriously remarked in a letter of March 1906, after reading the memorial volume to Sidgwick prepared by his wife and sister, that “He [Sidgwick] never did anything but wonder whether Christianity was true and prove that it wasn’t and hope that it was” (Harrod 1951: 116). Later, in writing his biographical memoir on Alfred Marshall, Keynes elaborated on this offhand judgement, sketching a later nineteenth-century Cambridge riven by scepticism and rationalism.
However, we should also note the relationship between faith and rationalism which Sidgwick represented. In the earlier part of the century scepticism about Anglican theology and religious practice was more likely to result in the embrace of Dissent: David Ricardo married a Quaker, and converted from Judaism to Unitarianism. The Anglicanism of Robert Malthus was the exception among progressive thinkers, bankers and merchants in early nineteenth-century England, and of course Scotland had long been Presbyterian. We too easily assume today that scepticism and religious doubt must end in lack of any faith.Sidgwick’s insistence on submitting the tenets of faith to rational examination also prompted his interest in psychical research, leading to a keen interest in verifying the claims by various mediums that they could communicate with the dead. A founding member of the Society for Psychical Research in 1882, this was an interest he shared with his wife. Another common interest was university education for women, and the Sidgwicks were closely involved in the foundation of Newnham College in 1880. One outcome of this was the naming of Sidgwick Avenue in Cambridge in his honour; and it is on the post-war Sidgwick Site that Cambridge’s Faculty of Economics and Politics can be found.
In 1869 Sidgwick had joined with others to establish unofficial lectures for women students, an initiative that led in 1871 to the purchase of a house for these students. It was in this context that Alfred Marshall first lectured on political economy, also meeting his future wife, Mary Paley, and jointly authoring with her his first book, The Economics of Industry (1879). College fellows had to surrender their appointment on marriage, and so Marshall’s marriage in 1877 took him first to University College, Bristol, then briefly to Oxford, before his return to the Cambridge chair in 1885. By this time Marshall was well advanced in the composition of Principles. Sidgwick’s election to the Knightbridge chair ensured that his subsequent interest in political economy would be confined to occasional lectures and involvement with Royal Commissions on university and secondary education, and taxation.
Nonetheless, Sidgwick’s Principles of Political Economy went into a second edition in 1887, and a third in 1901. The first two of its three books dealt with the “Science of Political Economy”, a broadly Millian account of production, distribution and exchange. Even in the early pages the influence of Jevons can be seen at work, in the idea that the relative market values of goods corresponds to “variations in the comparative estimates formed by people in general, not of the total utilities of the amounts purchased of such articles, but of their final utilities” (1883: 74-5, original emphases), this being complemented with the observation that a given commodity is “more useful when bought by the poor, because the poor have fewer luxuries and therefore get more enjoyment out of what they have” (1883: 76). In Book Three, on the art of political economy, Sidgwick returns to examine the problem raised by his treatment of wealth and utility: if the wealth of a country depends on its distribution among its inhabitants, then government policy with respect to taxation and tariffs can increase or diminish the wealth of a country. Here he also puts forward the idea that public goods exist, that for example “it may easily happen that the benefits of a well-placed lighthouse must be largely enjoyed by ships on which no toll could be conveniently imposed” (1883: 412-13).
Keith Tribe
See also:
Cambridge School of economics (II).