Hume endorsed the long-standing belief that our mental and physical faculties are more or less equal at birth until distinguished by education. He was not an egalitarian, however; there would always be rich and poor, and property rights trumped compassion for the poor. Nevertheless, Hume strongly opposed the ‘utility of poverty’ doctrine as a hindrance to economic growth. Hume sought to raise the standard of living of the lower classes and to expand the ‘middle station’ of merchants and manufacturers. In several of his essays, he identified policies for trade and taxes to achieve these ends. In Britain, it was clear to Hume that commerce and trade, particularly of cloth, had already enabled labourers to lift themselves out of poverty through the acquisition of skills, and that this upward path might continue indefinitely. Hume’s desire to reduce the inequality of income was motivated by utilitarian ends: a more prosperous labouring class would result in a happier nation, not only because of the larger basket of goods in the household but also because citizens would become more law-abiding and thus promote representative government and political stability. Global prosperity would ensue as other nations became trading partners.

INTRODUCTION

Although discourses on the subject of wealth and money reach back to antiquity, extensive theorising about economic phenomena only emerged in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations (1776) launched the classical theory of political economy which was developed in the nineteenth century, most notably by Jean-Baptiste Say, Thomas Robert Malthus, David Ricardo, and John Stuart Mill. Despite numerous differences, they were of one mind on the significance of labour in determining value and prices, on the perpetual strife between landowners, capitalists, and labourers, and on the inevitable onset of the ‘stationary state’ due to a tendency of the profit-rate to decline. Notwithstanding the fact that the British economy had grown at an unprecedented rate since the mid-eighteenth century, nineteenth-century economists were preoccupied with the problems of scarcity of land and capital, coupled with an overabundant population.

By the 1820s, it was commonplace in learned circles to refer to political economy as a science. It had an extensive list of laws and, in the hands of Ricardo, had gained a deductive rigour that was often compared to Euclidean geometry. Nevertheless, political economy was almost entirely a literary pursuit. Ricardo used hypothetical numerical examples to illustrate his principles, but he did not posit algebraic functions or undertake quantitative verifications of his derivations. The basic assumptions about human behaviour were also left rather vague, though it could be argued that, with the immediate ancestry of Hume and Smith, classical political economy was actually founded upon a rich set of insights into human nature.

The mercantilist pamphlets of the 1600s are commonly viewed as the first systematic writings on political economy, at least in the English language. While many of these works were unabashed promotions of merchant rights, historians have come to appreciate their rich array of insights on the topics of money, market forces, and the global economy. Two other important traditions of economic inquiry had emerged by the late seventeenth century, fostered by the rise of political freedom and the growth of a scientific culture. The first stems from John Locke’s Two Treatises of Government (1689–90), which addressed the problems of economic justice and distribution via the fundamental concepts of rights and property. Locke also privileged the economic contract in his state of nature and adumbrated a labor theory of value. The second tradition, exemplified by William Petty’s Political Arithmetic (1690), devised quantitative measures of economic phenomena, such as the national product of Ireland, the velocity and quantity of money, and the population of London. While Petty’s measures were bold and imprecise, they helped draw attention to aggregate phenomena and thus to new empirical relationships.

All three lines of thought spoke to the new capitalist system, which had transformed early modern Europe. As Joseph Schumpeter has rightly observed: “By the end of the fifteenth century most of the phenomena that we are in the habit of associating with that vague word Capitalism had put in their appearance,… [and] even then these phenomena were not all of them new.” He had in mind the prices of commodities and factors of production, such as the interest rate.

When economists think of joining their subject with biology, it is Alfred Marshall who springs to mind for his celebrated remark that “the Mecca of the economist is economic biology rather than economic dynamics” (Pigou 1925, 318). His endorsement of the same motto as Darwin regarding nature's inability to take leaps has also been taken to suggest that Marshall was profoundly influenced by Darwin (see Niman 1991). It is certainly very tempting, and quite easy, to tell the following story. Darwin's Origin of Species (1859) propelled biology into a respectable scientific field such that economists could then turn to it to emulate, in place of physics. More specifically, Darwin's insights greatly reinforced long-standing appeals by economists to competition, equilibrating mechanisms, and historical explanation. Most of all, his thoroughgoing materialism transformed our conception of human psychology and morality. Both were products of our evolutionary history and thus at bottom just refined instincts. Economists could discard, once and for all, appeals to a human nature designed by the deity.

I will challenge this view. More specifically, I will show that there is little evidence that Darwinian biology shaped the content or even the broader context of early neoclassical economics, particularly as represented by Marshall. In doing this, I do not wish to suggest that economic theory and the theory of evolution have nothing in common. On the contrary, biological and economic reasoning have been closely intertwined since the Enlightenment. But there is probably as much Linnaeus in Adam Smith as Darwin in Marshall.