Chalmers and Scottish Political
Economy
(From an introduction by Anthony
Waterman)
What then is the place of Thomas Chalmers in Scottish
political economy? In one respect any rate, it is a little like the place of
Lord Keynes in English political economy. He was the only internationally
recognized public figure in the history of Scotland to achieve distinction as
an economist. For more than two decades he compelled the often reluctant
attention of Melbourne and Russell, Peel and Aberdeen. Thousands lined the
streets of Edinburgh at his burial. The influence of Chalmers on economic
policy debates in the United Kingdom Parliament has been documented by Boyd
Hilton (1988).
More has been written about him in English, especially by
way of biography, than any other nineteenth-century economist save Marx. Adam
Smith and David Hume were well-known as philosophers in France and
England but were essentially private men, playing little part if any in great
affairs of state. No other Scottish economist has enjoyed more than merely
professional fame. He was also the last major economist to live and work in
Scotland. It is not altogether far-fetched to see Chalmers as a very late
chrysanthemum of the Scottish Enlightenment, withered suddenly by sharp
evangelical frost in 1810. James Mill and J. R. MCulloch, contemporary
Scottish economists of comparable intellectual weight, early chose the
fairest prospect in Scotland and worked in England, Mill from 1802 and
MCulloch from 1828. John Rae emigrated to Canada in 1822. And Chalmers
was a pioneer in the teaching of political economy in Scottish universities.
Dugald Stewarts annual lectures at the University of Edinburgh, beginning
in the academic year 1799-80, were the first ever to be devoted, ostensibly and
exclusively, to the new science. But they were more in the nature of what would
now be called outreach, intended for and attracting an audience
drawn from the general public and which included a number of distinguished
visitors from England. MCulloch gave somewhat similar public lectures in
Edinburgh before moving to London.
Long before these, of course, Adam
Smith had included much of what would later be called political
conomy in his Glasgow University lectures on Police. So
far as I can discover however, the courses in political economy that Chalmers
offered during his last two years at St Andrews (1826-27, 1827-28) were the
first in Scotland to be described as such, and recognized by the university as
part of the formal undergraduate programme in Moral Philosophy. By contrast
with England and Ireland, there were no professorial chairs in political
economy in Scotland for several more decades. In Edinburgh, a chair in
Commercial and Political Economy was finally created in 1870. A
lectureship in political economy was begun at Glasgow in 1892, and the Adam
Smith chair founded in 1896. A chair in Political Economy was established at
Aberdeen in 1921. And at Chalmerss alma mater a Lectureship in Political
Economy was begun in 1894 and a chair finally created in 1946. Thomas Chalmers
appears to have been the only professor in the world to offer a course of
lectures in political economy to Divinity students.
Home | Biography | Literature | Letters | Interests | Links | Quotes | Photo-Wallet