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Bonamy Price, 1807-1888.
British Historicist economist, long-time Drummond professor at Oxford.
Educated at Worcester College, Oxford, Bonamy Price went on to become a Rugby schoolmaster and sometime businessman and writer. Price was particularly interested in currency questions, a "free banking" advocate who promoted security-backed, rather than gold-backed, bank-issued currency.
Seeking a platform for his economic views, in 1868, Bonamy Price applied for the Drummond Professorship at Oxford. It was a fortuitous moment, as Oxford was then immersed in a conflict over the renewal of Thorold Rogers's appointment to the Drummond chair. In 1867, Oxford had repealed the old clause that required a two-year interval before a candidate could be considered for re-appointment. Rogers applied for a renewal, but his personal and political proclivities had alienated a section of the Oxford electors. They threw their weight behind the Rugby schoolmaster and Bonamy Price won the election. As it turns out, Bonamy Price was the first Drummond Professor to benefit from the repeal of the clause, being re-appointed in 1873, 1878 and 1883.
An English historicist by instinct, Bonamy Price is perhaps most famous for his pronouncements against Ricardian economics, indeed against all economic theory whatsoever. "So wild indeed has been this passion for scientific treatment,", Price lamented, "that Political Economy has been translated into mathematical formulas", (1878: p.3). Economics was not a science, he asserted, but exalted common sense.
"[Political Economy] is the application of common sense to familiar processes. It explains their nature and manner of working....But there is no strict sense in all of this, no deduction, step by step, from a few first principles, nor any construction of economic laws by induction. I can find no true economical law in Political Economy....What are called economic laws by most writers are mere tendencies. They profess no absolute and uniform character." (Price, 1878: p.15-16)
Price has been characterized as "an old gentleman who was never quite sure whether economic theory was impossible or merely undesirable" (Maloney, 1991: p.9). Bonamy Price's hostility to economic theory - coupled with his long-tenure as economist-in-chief - in no small way contributed to the general failure of Oxford to develop an alternative to the Marshallian orthodoxy then emanating from Cambridge.
On a side note, a conservative Protestant, Bonamy Price was a leading opponent of the "Oxford movement" of Cardinal Newman & co.
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All rights reserved, Gonçalo L. Fonseca