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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 June 2017
For his first review of someone else’s economic treatise following the publication of his own Principles of Political Economy in 1848, John Stuart Mill chose to examine Francis Newman’s Lectures on Political Economy (1851). One might expect that Mill’s review would be sympathetic. Both Mill and Newman were zealous reformers, much berated for pursuing endless “crotchets.” They were both great advocates of the two campaigns that, for Mill, eventually emerged as pre-eminent: land reform and the emancipation of women. It would be reasonable to assume that the political economy of each helped determine the scope and focus of his respective involvement in social reform, and there would be much commonality. Newman, moreover, had only the year before outraged orthodox opinion by his highly critical analysis of the New Testament in Phases of Faith. While Mill downplayed his own secularism, he would likely have felt more than a spark of kinship with someone who had managed to scandalize even liberal Unitarians.
An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Birmingham meeting of the Southern Conference on British Studies and Carolinas Symposium on British Studies in October 1998. I would like to thank the two anonymous readers for their trenchant criticisms and Mark Donoghue for providing some useful references.
1 The book was proposed by Westminster Review editor William Hickson, but Mill seemed eager to undertake the review (J. S. Mill to W. Hickson, 28 July 1851, in Mineka, Francis and Lindley, Dwight, eds., The Later Letters of John Stuart Mill, 1849-1873, (Toronto, 1972)Google Scholar, The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill [hereafter cited as CW] 14: 72.
2 Newman, F. to Martineau, J., October 1847; Newman, F. to Martineau, J., n.d. [August 1850]; Martineau Collection 8/119; 8/25a, Harris-Manchester College Library; See Martineau’s review of Phases of Faith (Prospective Review 15 (August 1850): 359–403)Google Scholar, and Newman’s printed response in the second and subsequent editions of Phases. (Phases of Faith; or. Passages from the History of My Creed (6th ed.; 1860; repr. New York, 1970), pp. 140-44, 149, 161). Newman’s arguments “constitute the most formidable direct attack ever made against Christianity in England.…Carlyle had not cared, Grote and Mill had not dared to publish their opinion of the reigning religion” ( Benn, A. W., The History of English Rationalism in the Nineteenth Century (1906; repr. New York, 1962), pp. 26–27)Google Scholar.
3 Carlyle, Thomas, The Life of John Sterling, vol. 11 of The Works of Thomas Carlyle (1851; repr. New York, n.d.), p. 184Google Scholar; Packe, Michael St. John, John Stuart Mill (London, 1954), p. 285Google Scholar; Sieveking, Isabelle G., Memoir and Letters of Francis W. Newman (London, 1909), pp. 137–38Google Scholar.
4 “I…have tried to cherish for him,” Newman wrote of his brother in a book that attacked the Cardinal’s integrity, “a sort of filial sentiment” ( Newman, Francis, Contributions Chiefly to the Early History of the Late Cardinal Newman, [2nd ed.; London, 1891]), p.viGoogle Scholar (Newman’s italics, here and subsequently). J. S. Mill’s conflicted relationship with James Mill is surely one of the most abundantly analyzed father-son relationships in history (See Mazlish, Bruce, James and John Stuart Mill: Father and Son in the Nineteenth Century [2nd ed.; Princeton, 1988])Google Scholar.
5 Lipkes, Jeff, Politics, Religion and Classical Political Economy in Britain: John Stuart Mill and His Followers (New York, 1999)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
6 There is only one, very inadequate, biography of Newman (Sieveking, Memoir). Bennett, James R., “Francis W. Newman and Religious Liberalism in Nineteenth Century England” (Ph.D. diss., Stanford University, 1961)Google Scholar, and Robbins, William, The Newman Brothers: An Essay in Comparative Biography (Cambridge, 1966)Google Scholar are confined largely to his religious thought, as are essays by Mozley, J. R. (“Francis William Newman,” The Hibbert Journal 23 (January 1925): 345–60)Google Scholar and Willey, Basil (“Francis W. Newman,” in More Nineteenth Century Studies: A Group of Honest Doubters [New York, 1956], pp. 11–52.)Google Scholar. Two recent articles have focused on aspects of his social and economic thought ( Shearmur, Jeremy, “Francis Newman and the ‘Austrian’ Critique of Socialism,” Advances in Austrian Economics 4 [1997]: 199–206CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Donoghue, M., “Francis William Newman on Irish Land Tenure Reform: A Contribution to the ‘Population Question’ in Mid-Victorian Britain,” unpublished paper).Google Scholar
7 Mill, J. S., “Newman’s Political Economy” (Westminster Review 56 (October 1851): 83–101)Google Scholar, in Robson, John, ed., Essays on Economics and Society (Toronto, 1967), CW, 5: 441.Google Scholar
8 Ibid., p. 442.
9 Ibid.
10 Ibid., p. 454.
11 Ibid., p. 445.
12 Ibid., p. 448.
13 Ibid., p. 442.
14 Newman, Francis, Lectures on Political Economy (London, 1851), pp. 10–11.Google Scholar
15 Mill, “Newman’s Political Economy,” p. 445.
16 Ibid., p. 446.
17 Ibid., p. 453.
18 Newman, , Lectures, p. 305.Google Scholar
19 Ibid., p. 292.
20 He is indebted here, he notes, to his friend Toulmin Smith, who made it his life’s work to revitalize institutions of local governance (Newman, Lectures, p. iv). Newman also makes a strong case for adoption (ibid., pp. 306-09).
21 Mill, “Newman’s Political Economy,” p. 457.
22 Ibid. Earlier, however, in an attack on Newman’s defense of competition, Mill insists on the immorality of paying lower-than-customary wages, even if this is proposed by a worker (ibid., pp. 446-47).
23 Ibid., p. 454.
24 Ibid., p. 454-55.
25 Ibid., p. 455.
26 Robson, John, ed., Principles of Political Economy (Toronto, 1965), CW 2 and 3: lxvi and 1026–32Google Scholar, and Hayek, Friedrich, John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor: Their Friendship and Subsequent Marriage (New York, n.d. [1951]), pp. 134–41.Google Scholar Taylor targeted Mill’s discussion of socialism; essentially, she convinced him to delete or amend his criticisms, so that where the first edition is quite skeptical about the claims of its proponents, the second, when it does not actually endorse these, adopts a position of scrupulous agnosticism. Of a sentence she asks him to expunge, Mill writes plaintively that if it “is not tenable, then all the two or three pages of argument which precede & of which this is but a summary, are false & there is nothing to be said against Communism at all—one would only have to turn round & advocate it…” (ibid., p. 135; see also the discussion in Gertrude Him-melfarb, “The Other John Stuart Mill,” in Victorian Minds [New York, 1970], pp. 133-38).
27 Hayek, Mill and Taylor, p. 170.
28 Mill, J. S., Preface to [Taylor, H.], “The Enfranchisement of Women,” in Dissertations and Discussions, vol. 2 (1859; repr. New York, 1973), p. 411.Google Scholar
29 George Mill to Algernon Taylor, 27 September 1851, in Hayek, Mill and Taylor, p. 179.
30 Hayek, , Mill and Taylor, p. 163.Google Scholar
31 Packe, , John Stuart Mill, pp. 348–57Google Scholar; Hayek, H., Mill and Taylor, pp. 165–81Google Scholar. Coleman describes how, immediately before her own marriage, she was astonished to receive letters from her brother that made her “aware that individually I was an object of no interest to you, that you had no affection for me,” letters that cut her to the quick (Packe, John Stuart Mill, pp. 171-72). Mill’s letters to his sister on this occasion have not survived, but at the very least it is interesting that it was news of her engagement that precipitated the wounding words.
32 The Subjection of Women, in John Robson, ed., Essays on Equality, Law and Education (Toronto, 1984), CW, 21: 336.
33 Ibid., p. 335.
34 Mill, J. S. to d’Eichthal, G., 23 February 1841, Mineka, Francis, ed., The Earlier Letters of John Stuart Mill, 1812-1848 (Toronto, 1963), CW, 13: 465.Google Scholar
35 Mill, J. S. to Taylor, H., 19 February 1849, Mineka and Lindley, eds., Later Letters, CW, 14: 9-10; Mill to?, after 9 November 1855, ibid., p. 500.Google Scholar
36 Chapters on Socialism, in Robson, John, ed., Essays on Economics and Society (Toronto, 1967)Google Scholar, CW, 5: 748n. (For a somewhat different chronology, see Himmelfarb, Gertrude, On Liberty and Liberalism: The Case of John Stuart Mill [2nd ed.; San Francisco, 1990], pp. 273–75)Google Scholar.
37 Principles of Political Economy, p. 768. Mill, however, failed to delete from the second and subsequent editions his high praises for peasant proprietorships in chapters 6 and 7 of Book II (Principles of Political Economy, 2 vols. [Toronto, 1965], CW, 2: 252-96). After his wife’s death, he again reversed himself, once more championing small holdings, particularly for Ireland (Lipkes, Politics, Religion, pp. 57-61.)
38 Rose, Phyllis, Parallel Lives: Five Victorian Marriages (New York, 1984), p. 140.Google Scholar
39 The Soul, Her Sorrows and Her Aspirations: An Essay Towards the Natural History of the Soul, as the True Basis of Theology (3rd ed.; London, 1852), p. 91. lames cites Newman on pp. 79-80, The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902; repr. New York, n.d.).
40 The Soul (London, 1849), p. 112.
41 Ibid., p. 95.
42 Ibid., p. 98.
43 Ibid., p. 112.
44 Ibid., p. 98.
45 Ibid., p. 99.
46 Ibid. Gender analogies abound in The Soul, with some unintentionally comic permutations. Of those who are conventionally religious but “have no hungering…after righteousness…we may say ‘We have a little sister, and she has no breasts’” (ibid., p. 52). When elaborating the distinction between the once- and twice-born, he returns to this image: “To those who were religious, but not spiritual, we…applied the words: ‘We have a little sister, and she has no breasts,’ but behold, the little sister is grown up, and still she has no breasts, for she is a Man!” (ibid., p. 112).
47 Ibid., p. 105.
48 Ibid., p. 120.
49 Ibid., p. 128.
50 Ibid., p. 129. He himself did not experience this leap of faith, according to his testimony in Phases of Faith, p. 133.
51 Newman, F. to Chapman, J., 12 November 1857Google Scholar, Newman Collection, MSS 264, Beinecke Library, Yale University. Writing to his brother on the last day of 1857, Newman called Theism “the work of my life” ( Newman, F. to Newman, J., 31 December 1857Google Scholar, Letters of Newman, F. W. [uncatalogued], Birmingham Oratory)Google Scholar.
52 Newman, F. W., Theism, Doctrinal and Practical, or Didactic Religious Utterances (London, 1858), p. 112.Google Scholar
53 Ibid.
54 “Marriage Laws,” Miscellanies, vol. 3: Essays, Tracts or Addresses Political and Social (London, 1889), p. 223.
55 Hebrew Theism: The Common Basis of Judaism, Christianity, and Mohammedism (London, 1874), p. 104.
56 Ibid., p. 102.
57 Ibid., p. 103.
58 Ibid., p. 104.
59 Ibid., p. 103-04.
60 “Marriage Laws,” Miscellanies, 3: 233.
61 Ibid.
62 The Globe and Traveller, Monday, October 6, 1851, p. 1.
63 Mozley, T., Reminiscences, Chiefly of Oriel College and the Oxford Movement, 2 vols. (New York, 1882)Google Scholar, 2: 44; Sieveking, , Memoir, pp. 14–23Google Scholar; Trevor, Meriol, Newman: The Pillar of the Cloud (Garden City, N.J., 1962), pp. 365–66Google Scholar; O’Faolain, Sean, Newman’s Way (New York, 1952), pp. 151–55.Google Scholar
64 Ward, Maisie, Young Mr Newman (New York, 1948), p. 166.Google Scholar
65 Holyoake, George Jacob, Bygones Worth Remembering, 2 vols. (New York, 1905), 1: 197.Google Scholar
66 Conway, Moncure D., Autobiography, Memories and Experiences, 2 vols. (Boston, 1904), 1; 442.Google Scholar
67 Newman, F. to Martineau, J., 17 March 1852, Martineau Collection 8/31, Harris-Manchester College; Newman, F. to Nicholson, J., 21 July 1976, in Sieveking, Memoir, pp. 58–59;Google Scholar Newman, F. to Mozley, J. R., 7 August 1876, n. 6, ALS 342, Special Collections, Sterling Library, London University.Google Scholar
68 Sieveking, Memoir, p. 59.
69 “Marriage Laws,” p. 238.
70 Newman to Martineau, 25 July 1848; Martineau Papers 3/18, Harris-Manchester College, Oxford
71 Lectures, p. 111.
72 Ibid., pp. 109-10.
73 Ibid., p. 111.
74 Ibid., pp. 95-96, 109, 111-13, 116-18.
75 Ibid., pp. 13, 115-16, 153.
76 Lipkes, Politics, Religion, pp. 3-33.
77 Hilton, Boyd, the Age of Atonement: The Influence of Evangelicalism on Social and Economic Thought, 1785-1865 (Oxford, 1991);Google Scholar Waterman, A. M. C., Revolution, Economics and Religion: Christian Political Economy, 1798-1833 (Cambridge, 1991)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For more encompassing discussions, see Viner, J., The Role of Providence in the Social Order (Philadelphia, 1972)Google Scholar, Nelson, R. H., Reaching for Heaven on Earth: The Theological Meaning of Economics (Lanham, Md., 1991)Google Scholar, and Brennan, H. G. and Waterman, A. M. C., eds., Economics and Religion: Are They Distinct? (Boston, 1994)Google Scholar.
78 Hebrew Theism, pp. 100-02.
79 Their Theism, however, has a different basis. For Thornton, writing against Huxley, Lewes, and Spencer, the design of the universe testifies to the existence of God. For Newman it is Conscience (The Soul, pp. 57-88, 100-03),
80 Newman, Lectures, p 120.
81 Ibid.
82 Ibid., p. 119.
83 Marginalism shifted the focus of economics from the distribution of income among workers, capitalists, and land owners, and the effect of this distribution on the national economy, to an interest in the way individuals and firms allocate goods already produced and services ready to be provided. Marginalism analyzes in particular how the market price of a good or service is determined by the intensity of the competing desires on the part of consumers for an additional increment of it—its “marginal utility.” The intensity reflects the simple central insight of marginalism that the more we have of any one item, the less we want: demand curves slope downward. If we know the “demand schedules” for market participants, we can calculate the optimal outcome of exchanges for buyers and sellers. Thus, in centering on consumers’ desires rather than producers’ costs, marginalism permitted the application of differential calculus to economic questions. Though a gifted mathematician (apart from his first class honors at Oxford, he published two student texts on mathematics), Newman had no interest in converting political economy into an exact science, Jevons’ great project. Newman had a deep aversion to Bentham, while Jevons was a far more thoroughgoing utilitarian even than Mill.
84 Jeremy Shearmur links Newman’s skepticism about the ability of socialism to price goods to the position of Hayek and Mises—Menger’s heirs—in the Socialist Calculation Debate of the 1920s and 1930s, though there is no question of any direct influence on the participants ( Shearmur, J.. “Francis Newman and the ‘Austrian’ Critique of Socialism”). Newman expresses his own indebtedness to Robert Torrens, Thompson, T. P., and Banfieid, Thomas (Newman, Lectures, pp. 86–87.Google Scholar) There was a robust anti-Ricardian tradition in British economics until 1848.
85 Newman, Lectures, p. 13.
86 Ibid., pp. 80-81.
87 Ibid., p. 84.
88 Ibid., p. 85.
89 Ibid., p. 87.
90 Ibid., p. 89.
91 Ibid., p. 90.
92 Ibid., p. 107.
93 Ibid., p. 96.
94 Ibid., p. 118.
95 Ibid., pp. 115-16.
96 Ibid., p. 118.
97 Ibid., p. 115.
98 Ibid., p. 123.
99 Ibid.
100 Lipkes, J., “Religion and the Reception of Marginalism in Britain,” Forum for Social Economics 26 (Spring 1997): 21–42.Google Scholar
101 Newman, Phases, pp. 152-57. Newman to Martineau, n.d., October 1847, Martineau Collection 8/1 la, Harris-Manchester College. See also Newman to Mozley, J. R., 23 August 1877, n. 8, ALS 342, Sterling Library, London University Special Collections)Google Scholar.
102 Newman, Hebrew Theism, p. 28.
103 Newman, Lectures, p. 291.
104 Ibid.
105 Ibid., p. 188.
106 Ibid., pp. 125-27, 133, 137, 150, 187. In a particularly impassioned passage, Newman equates private property in land with slavery (p. 133).
107 Newman, The Soul, pp. 50-51, 57.
108 Sieveking, Memoir, p. 139.
109 “There was, indeed, scarcely a crotchet, except ‘spiritualism,’ of which he was not at one time or another an advocate” (Richard Garnett, “Francis William Newman,” Encyclopedia Britannica, vol. 19 [11th ed.; Cambridge, 1911], p. 517). See also the characterizations in Bellot, H. Hale, University College London, 1826-1926 (London, 1929), pp. 256–58Google Scholar; Ward, , Young Mr Newman, pp. 166–67Google Scholar; Himmelfarb, “The Victorian Angst,” in Victorian Minds, p. 309, and the caricature in Trilling, Lionel, Matthew Arnold (New York, 1949), pp. 168–67.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
110 Willey, Basil, More Nineteenth Century Studies, p. 46.Google Scholar
111 Newman’s attacks on pollution and the irresponsible use of natural resources (“The Barbarisms of Civilization,” Miscellanies, 3; 452-60) will resonate with many Americans at the start of the 21st century (Newman even deplores “the want of ozone,” ibid., p. 455). Many will similarly applaud Newman’s defense of what was in his day a highly eccentric practice, vegetarianism. Even anti-vivesectionism is making a comeback. Few contemporaries, however, oppose birth control and fewer still vaccination—yet, Newman’s opposition to the latter is explicitly linked to his attack on pollution (ibid., p. 463).
112 Newman, Lectures, p. 157.
113 Ibid., p. 71.
114 Ibid., p. 287. The quotation is from Toulmin Smith.
115 Ibid., p. 310.
116 Ibid., p. 311.
117 Ibid., pp. 213-14. Though under no illusions about the individuals who have acquired power in the past, they were “men of violence—audacious and unscrupulous robbers” (“Guidance or Anarchy,” in Miscellanies, 3: 293), with the participation of “the mass of private citizens” “Universal Justice” may be realized by a new generation of virtuous statesmen (“On the State as a Corrupting Power,” in ibid., p. 394). A “Council of the Wise—a Wittenagemote”—will reform the nation’s laws (“Guidance or Anarchy,” in ibid., p. 293), and when the “Kossuths and Mazzinis rule on the continent (as they shall), we will witness a new Moral World” (“International Immorality,” in ibid., p. 20).
118 Knights, Ben, The Idea of the Clerisy in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, 1978), pp. 140–77.Google Scholar
119 See Hamburger, Joseph, “Religion and On Liberty,” in Laine, M., ed., A Cultivated Mind (Toronto, 1991), pp. 139–81, which improves on the argument of Maurice Cowling, Mill and Liberalism (2nd ed.; Cambridge, 1990).Google Scholar
120 Newman, Lectures, p. 119.