John Kells Ingram, 1823-1907.

Irish ballad-writer, pedagogue and economist, John K. Ingram was one of the prominent figures of the "English" Historical School. 

Born in Donegal, Ireland, to an (Episcopalian) Church of Ireland family. John Kells Ingram attended Trinity College Dublin.  Graduating in 1843, Ingram was elected fellow in 1846.  He would remain as a teacher and/or administrator at Trinity for much of the rest of his life.  Ingram had an early brush of celebrity when his youthful 1843 poem, "The Memory of the Dead" (referring to the 1798 rebellion), became a popular Irish ballad -- indeed, that is perhaps Ingram's most enduring claim to fame.   

The breadth of Ingram's scholarship was interesting -- according to Richard Ely, Ingram was "probably the most learned man in the world". Soon after graduating, he was employed by Trinity as a lecturer in oratory (from 1852), English literature (from 1855) and Greek (from 1866).  But he dabbled in economics and statistics as well, being a founder of the Dublin Statistical Society in 1847.

Like his comrade-in-arms, Thomas Cliffe-Leslie (who was also at Trinity), Ingram was seduced by the sociological vision of Auguste Comte and suspicious of the claims of the Ricardian School.  In his celebrated 1878 address to Section F of the British Association for the Advancement of Science (BAAS), Ingram went on the offensive, dismissing the Classical School and the deductive method of economic reasoning as incomplete and speculative, advocating the Historicist  approach as much more "scientific".  He deplored the materialism, ideology, abstractionism and scientism of Classical theory, arguing instead for a institutional and historical treatment of economics under the Comtian umbrella of "sociology".

In 1879, Ingram was appointed Librarian at Trinity College Dublin.  In 1886, he took up the more leisurely post of Senior Lecturer.  It was around this time that he wrote his numerous entries into the Encyclopedia Britannica on the more famous economists, including a thumbnail sketch of the history of economic thought (1885).  This latter entry Ingram expanded and transformed into a separate book, History of Political Economy (1888).  It employs the "historicist" method to intellectual history, grounding the evolution of economic thought in the actual economic, political and social conditions of the time.  It helped knock the Ricardians down a peg or two, and catapulted Ingram into international renown.  

Ingram's address and treatise was celebrated by the Historicists in America and Germany.  But Ingram was, in many ways, less interested in furthering the Historicist research program as it existed then and more interested in harnessing it to the Comtian vision and impressing it with a duty for social melioration.  Ingram, after all, was also a scholar of religion and morals.

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