------------ EH.NET BOOK REVIEW --------------
Title: Francis Ysidro Edgeworth: A Portrait with Family and Friends

Author: Barbé, Lluis
Reviewer: Samuels, Warren J.

Published by EH.NET (August 2010)

Lluis Barbé, Francis Ysidro
Edgeworth: A Portrait with Family and Friends. Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar,
2010.  xxxvi + 291 pp. $150 (hardback), ISBN: 978-1-84844-716 5.

Reviewed for EH.NET by Warren J. Samuels, Department of Economics,
Michigan State University.

Introduction

A glance at the
subtitle of this book -- A Portrait with Family and Friends -- will suggest
its unusual character, one derived from several sources with which the
author, Professor of Economic Theory at Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona,
Spain, is both comfortable and candid.  Barbé writes that “This book
does not pretend to offer a profound intellectual portrait of Francis Ysidro
Edgeworth; rather it is simply a personal portrait that can help us grasp his
temperament and his feelings in order to better understand his development as
an individual and as a social scientist” (p. xxiii).

The book
does that and does it well.  I suggest, however, that Barbé has too
narrow a view of what he has accomplished on behalf of other historians and
methodologists of economic thought, in at least two respects:  (1)
providing suggestive evidence of the comfortable fit of neoclassical
economics in middle-class society and therefore that class’s receptiveness
to neoclassical theory and ideas; and (2) providing evidence of how
neoclassical economic theory was worked out during a major period of the
transformation of economic theory. He has, intentionally or otherwise,
provided both types of evidence at least in part because pieces of each type
were to be found in his materials and in part because he was alert --
sensitive to and receptive of its importance.  In regard to both (1) and
(2), I doubt if any absolutely new type of evidence is presented; however,
the evidence seems to be trustworthy.  The evidence was made and
collected by members of Edgeworth’s extended family and professional
colleagues in their correspondence to each other about their activities. The
evidence was found in the hands of independent archivists.

Barbé
was not alone in being comfortable with his project.  He received
encouragement and assistance from a number of well-known economists.
The list includes Josep Fontana, Antoin Murphy, José Luis Cardoso, A. W.
Coats and John Creedy, who also contributed the Preface.

Genealogical Matters

One source of evidence is the huge number
of persons comprising Edgeworth’s extended family:  on his father’s
side, an Anglo-Irish family of Protestant descent, and on his mother’s
side, a Catalan family, much smaller in number but with at least some liberal
and constitutionalist views.  The economist and statistician we know as
Francis Ysidro Edgeworth was born in 1845, the son of Francis Beaufort
Edgeworth (1809-1846) and Rosa Florentina Eroles (1815-1864). His paternal
grandfather, Richard Lovell Edgeworth (1744-1817), was thrice widowed and
altogether had twenty-two children. Eleven pages of genealogical diagrams
were needed to identify the extended family, and it is
incomplete.

Barbé has made several genealogical discoveries. He has found
that the future great economist and statistician had been given at birth the
name, Ysidro Francis Edgeworth. After long being called Francis or Frank,
however, he transposed his Christian names when he started publishing in
1876.

Barbé also has corrected the misidentification of
Edgeworth’s mother, Rosa Florintina Eroles, made initially by the Hispanist
Lord Holland, and subsequently continued by Lord John Maynard Keynes and Sir
John R. Hicks.  Her father was not the absolutist and anti-liberal Baron
Eroles but General {?} Antonio Eroles i Sancho (1779-1840?).  The
misidentification was partly predicated upon erroneously taking a name for a
title.  The misinformation, however, helped overcome opposition by
several female Edgeworth relatives to the (eventual 1831) marriage of his
parents.  Those women had found Rosa Eroles deficient in social status
and beauty.

Barbé reports on related matters, which as a
Catalan he apparently did not seek to find.  One possibility is
established by the question, “Yet what kind of honourable enterprises may a
courageous militia commander undertake which allow him to get rich very
rapidly?”  He finds that “we should not discard the possibility that
part of Ecoles’ income came from illegal trade or from the mere conveyance
of smuggled goods” (p. 23).

Several complications arise.
The area in which Antonio Eroles and his family lived (bordering Andorra and
France) was a center of the smuggling of Andorran tobacco, French mules and
Canadian textiles (most commonly a cotton material printed on one side,
roughly similar to calico and called indiana).  Also, Francis Beaufort
Edgeworth translated indiana incorrectly as calico from the West
Indies.  He also alluded to a gift of some mules from Antonio Eroles as
an aid to the liberal cause.  One position was that smuggling was not a
source of great wealth, only a means of supplementing one’s income during
hard times (which. may very well have been frequent, perhaps so frequent as
to seem to be, for all particular purposes, a permanent condition).

Other possibilities have Antonio Eroles being a (former?) stonecutter,
performing questionable jobs for a superior, and, with his son, receiving
higher salaries than their respective ranks warranted.  The actual
military rank of the future bride’s father’s is uncertain.

Barbé suggests as another reputable alternative that Rosa’s father had
retained unspent funds originally intended to pay soldiers who deserted when
Spain was invaded by the Royalists in 1823. (Not everyone would consider that
a “reputable” explanation, though Antonio Eroles’ relation to his
commanding general and others is hazy.) Rosa’s age at the time is another
complicating matter.  A further basis of the misidentification may have
been Rosa’s “childish version of the facts that her father had brought
home,” namely “to build a hospital in his native place” (pp. 22-23,
quoting letter, dated July 1832, from Francis Beaufort Edgeworth to his
mother Frances Anne Edgeworth). The letter offers still another explanation
of her father’s rapidly accumulated wealth:  “the father had been
saving up money for a long time.  He had been a West Indies merchant
dealing in indigo ... and this money he was able to carry off in his hour of
need” (pp. 22-23).  In 1830 Antonio Eroles and his family were
political refugees in London.  Eroles worked with other anti-Royalists
to organize expeditions moving through France against Spain (his rank may
well have been self-adopted).  However, France, after reaching an
entente with Ferdinand VII of Spain, reversed its policy of supporting
expeditions to one of neutrality.  Eroles and his son, Isidro, were held
under arrest by the French government for more than a year -- and, inter
alia, could not attend his daughter’s wedding.  Lord Holland, Lord
Keynes and Sir Hicks have been corrected, but new questions have
arisen.  The Edgeworth opposition to the marriage may have had some
merit.

It is fascinating to think, as Ronald Coase has shown, that
Alfred Marshall, undoubtedly the most influential economist of the period,
was not exactly candid and honest about his family and ancestry.  With
the nineteenth-century transformation of class structure, more people openly
engaged in status emulation, even to the extent of misrepresentation.

The basis of those findings and, indeed, of much of the family
history recounted by Barbé, was his discovery of a cache of some two
thousand family letters and other documents that were archived in the
National Library of Ireland and the Bodleian at  Oxford.  This
principal discovery was precipitated by his visit, while touring Ireland, to
the church and manor house of the Edgeworth family, now a senior citizens’
residence, in Edgeworthstown, and his inquiry to a nun about any family
letters or documents.
The question of the identity and heritage
of Edgeworth’s mother, with the concomitant opportunity to correct a Nobel
Laureate (p. xxi), plus Barbé being a Catalan economist himself (p. xxi),
motivated a fifteen-year research project.  It resulted in a novel -- a
“fictional narrative on the most relevant events -- both good and bad --
that [the family] had witnessed” (pp. xxii) during roughly the period of
Edgeworth’s life (1845-1926).  The novel, written in Catalan, won a
literary prize and had a printing of 50,000 copies.

The
Comfortable Fit of Neoclassical Economics in Middle-Class Society

Barbé’s portrait in the book under review is a set piece for
Edgeworth’s family and class although the evidence is only
suggestive.  Given people’s preferences, they tend to act in a manner
congruent with the neoclassical model.

The family is large, active
and interesting.  Early death by a new born and/or the mother was
common.  Education, by either home tutors or organized schools is
understood to be important for continuation and enhancement of class and
individual position. To have in one’s family someone with an
extraordinarily successful academic record is a mark of distinction.
For someone to go on and become a spectacularly famous scholar is even more
impressive.  For a family to have more than one member recognized to be
among the elite of their profession is unusual if not rare.  The
Edgeworth family had at least two such individuals, Maria Edgeworth and her
nephew, Francis Ysidro Edgeworth, and each was, in part, identified in terms
of their activity pertaining to economics, in a period in which a main issue
was whether or not the working class should be informed of the findings of
Political Economy.  The aunt was particularly noted for her relationship
to David Ricardo and to Sir William Hamilton.   Other famous people
who interacted socially with family members included Erasmus Darwin, James
Watt, Joseph Priestly, Josiah Wedgewood, and Francis Galton.  Of course,
on such matters one should not omit Edgeworth’s relations as a student with
his and other professors.  The latter included John Kells Ingram at
Trinity College Dublin and Benjamin Jowett and Thomas Hill Green at Balliol
College Oxford.

Consideration of the relations of some family
members to other famous people can hardly outdo the relations developed by
the holder of the Drummond Chair at Oxford; the economist ranked second only
to Alfred Marshall; the first editor of the Economic Journal, published by
the Royal Economic society; president of the Royal Statistical Society, whose
Guy Medalist he was five years earlier, and twice president of Section F of
the British Association.  One cannot over-estimate the magnitude and
importance of his relations to others.  As John Creedy knowingly
commences his Preface, “Edgeworth was a leading figure in the rapid
development of economics during the last quarter of the nineteenth century
and the first quarter of the twentieth century, by which time it was firmly
established as an academic subject” (p. xii).  Creedy also notes that
“the period marks ... a distinct change of emphasis in the study of
economics, in the transition to neoclassical economics from the classical
economics associated with Adam Smith” (p. xiii) and at least doubles
Edgeworth’s importance by emphasizing that “[h]e achieved eminence as a
statistician as well as an economist” (p. xii).  In part due to his
several highly visible positions, in part because he “was a prolific and
highly original author who, in a cosmopolitan age, had probably the widest
correspondence with economists all over the world ... a man  of
enormously wide reading and considerable linguistic skills” (p. xii), he
was indeed a leading figure.

But not all activity was
laudable.  Excessive gambling and concomitant losses, alcoholism,
extravagant spending, and/or failure in one’s career or position are
deprecated.  One family member, an army officer serving in India was
brought up on charges of participating in “a heavy gambling
affair.”  The family as a whole is not necessarily, even likely, to
come to the rescue of a member exhibiting self-destructive, noxious, or
harmful behavior.  Albeit not necessarily fully excluded from the group,
such an embarrassing member would not have an affirmative, salient
role.

One individual had to be careful with money; another
might become wildly independent at the tender age of seven (pp. 4-5) and
require family control, to whatever extent if might be effective. Some
activity in feudal or post-feudal institutions is likely (in the case of the
family, Edgeworthstown, an inheritable community, which provided rent-paying
tenants but also “administrative headaches” (p. 210).  Upon
inheriting the property in 1911 and having assumed his new role of landlord,
under pressure from the Tenants’ League, the Oxford professor lowered all
rents by 20 percent (p. 211). Francis was “just like his grandfather
Richard Lovell Edgeworth. ... also a Justice of the Peace in the best feudal
tradition” (p. 153).

Support of and/or participation in
scientific activities, here the Lunar Society, is found in varied
activities.  Individuals and the class to which they belonged could
encompass diverse beliefs, some rejecting religious creeds, some feeling that
creeds were only fit and proper, some more or less willing to be associated
with a particular creed and/or that some individuals wished to be, say, a
Christian, or that one no longer held the youngster’s early intention to
enter the church (in Edgeworth’s case, changing his mind twice, first, the
church, and, second, law (pp, 85,163)).

Mistrust and disputes
could develop between individuals and/or subgroups.  Some individuals
were engaged in political activity (in either Ireland or England).  The
same and/or other individuals could be engaged in social activities.
One could say, in retrospect, that family members contemplated the family as
an institution, i.e., the family was something in which its members made
investments akin to (we would say) human or social capital.  Relations
among family members were manifest in the cache of letters.  Relations
between family members and others were also manifest but more episodic.

Every family has episodes of the unusual.  One 13 year old
managed to escape boarding school. Five years later, he deserted and his
father had to pay £10 to the Royal Navy for his expenses (p. 5).

The Act of Union provided for Irish representation in the two houses of
Parliament.  One member of the family, in response to what he thought
were non-democratic pressures, left the new politics completely (p. 7).

Maria Edgeworth was named an honorary member of the Royal Irish
Academy, of which her father had been a founder. She is reported by Barbé to
have greatly enjoyed the distinction, “since she humbly considered that,
despite her texts on education, she had no scientific merits whatsoever”
(p. 31).  Barbé also writes that Maria “was to her dying day the
leading character in Edgeworthstown.  All decisions of any importance,
especially financial ones, were referred to her.  She was active even in
the education of Rosa’s children” (p. 37).

On the basis
of the foregoing information, and without passing judgment, I suggest that
the businesslike, rationally calculating, order- and security-loving
attitudes of what appears to have been held and acted upon by (at least) the
Anglo-Irish members of the Edgeworth family were congruent with the
middle-class belief system of neoclassical economics.

How
Neoclassical Economic Theory Was Worked Out during a Major Period of the
Transformation of Economic Theory

Both Creedy and Barbé focus on
Edgeworth’s period as one in which economists transformed their discipline
from classical into neoclassical economics.  This transformation
centered on several lines.  One line was that of the meaning to be given
to economic action.  A second line had to do with the scope and central
problem of economics, especially the system of organization and control, or
power structure.  A third line was the construction of a purely
conceptual, i.e., a-institutional model of the economy.  A fourth line
was the protocol stipulating what was required in the analysis of problems
and the generation of solutions.  The stipulation that was worked out
required the theorist or analyst to produce unique determinate equilibrium
optimal solutions -- typically competitive solutions.

Through his utilitarianism, Edgeworth was clearly most importantly involved
in the first line, the meaning to be given to economic action, but he seems
to have had influence in the other lines as well.

Most economists
have seemed to prefer to think that the transformational lines which they
articulate on blackboards are somehow related to a given, transcendental
economic order.  Barbé’s study of Edgeworth suggests that any
meaningful account of the transformational process in which he participated
was one in which decisions were made, consciously or unconsciously, about the
content of those four lines.  In this manner human subjective
perceptions and preferences -- all essentially assertions -- dominate the
process of defining and explicating the economy.  Particularly
noteworthy is Barbé’s view of Edgeworth that “the most original subject
in his research so far [i.e., by 1877] had been what he had called ‘Exact
Utilitarianism,’ which was close to theoretical research in natural law”
(p. 85).   It seems to this reviewer that the adoption of a purely
conceptual notion of the economy has been the equivalent in practice of
combining those two concepts, even though the imagined “exactitude” is
either a fiction or wishful thinking.  Economists from at least the time
of Alfred Marshall have sought to construct an economics that would
facilitate and reinforce the status of economics as a science.  It
appears to this author that notwithstanding the depth and brilliance of
Edgeworth’s utilitarianism, his approach was too laden with ontological
formulations to unequivocally comport with the desires of his high-theory
oriented colleagues and their quest for the status of economics as a
science.

Although the construction of the protocols
involved a number of ironies, I mention only the one involving the
juxtaposition of purely conceptual categories in Edgeworth’s economics to
the statistical techniques he created or adopted for handling empirical
economic substance.

(Two terms -- ontology and utilitarian --
require a few words for sake of specificity and, hopefully, clarity.
One historiographic problem arises when one takes, for example, the elements
of an eighteenth-century body of thought and defines one of those elements
using a twentieth-century understanding of that element.

By
ontology I mean that branch of metaphysics which deals with the absolute and
ultimate nature of things.  It assumes that things have an ultimate
nature that transcends both materiality and human choice, i.e., empirical
economic substance.

By utilitarianism I intend to include Hedonism
and Benthamism as theories of human nature, of ethics, of whose interests
count/should count, of how meaning and values are worked out by the
interactions among decisional agents, and so on.

Kevin Hoover
emailed me, in his commentary on an earlier version of this review, that
“It is odd to me to identify ‘the theory of bargain in the wide sense,’
with utilitarian moral philosophy’ as you do here.  Bargaining as
analyzed by Edgeworth employs utility functions, but the mere fact of using
utility functions does not itself implicate one in being a utilitarian in an
ethical sense, Classical utilitarianism is not about bilateral bargaining in
which one the individual puts himself first, but is a social/ethical doctrine
that says that we ought to base policy on the good of all people properly
aggregated.  Edgeworth was, no doubt, a utilitarian, as well as a user
of utility functions, but the analysis of a bargaining itself can’t be the
essence of his utilitarianism, since it is not necessarily utilitarian at
all” (Hoover to Samuels, July 07, 2010).  The discussion in this
section of my review derives from the central argument of this review,
namely, that reformulated economic theory during 1850-1925 was worked out in
a helter-skelter manner and reflected the philosophical and economic and
other interests of individual economists and not the economy itself.)

Without intending to comment on Hoover’s commentary, I must say
that one can use it to illustrate the main point of this review:  that
the history of the transformation of economic theory during the period
roughly 1850-1925 involved an ad hoc slicing and dicing of ingredients
assembled without a recipe, or without a fully detailed recipe.  In the
resulting array of positions one can find combinations of elements of
ontological and of utilitarian theory.  The resulting dish was thus
likely to taste differently from cook to cook and from several versions of
the dish produced over a period of time by one cook.

Creedy
rightly suggests that the place to start is the Mathematical Psychics (1881),
which was “written right at the start of Edgeworth’s career as an
economist” and which “also provides the key to all his later work and his
lasting importance to economists” (p. xii).  In a sense the
transformation from classical to neoclassical economics was a retrenchment,
from “dynamic themes of growth and development” to “the nature of
exchange” (p. xiii).  The two were quite different visions.  The
classical vision teased a theory of exchange out of the social product.
“Edgeworth himself” later remarked “that ‘in pure economics there is
only one fundamental theorem, but that is a very difficult one:  the
theory of bargain in the wide sense’” (p. xiii).  The latter was
principally utilitarian moral philosophy.  On the one hand, it signified
utility maximization, for which a famous line by Malthus and numerous famous
discussions by Bentham were directional precursors.   On the other
hand, the Edgeworth box illustrated the multiple (i.e., a range of
non-unique) possibilities of trading, given different initial endowments.
Both in its original form in the Edgeworth box and in the subsequent work of
Pareto, a core of multiple possible but noncomparable efficient solutions
existed.  “The utility maximizing approach was immediately congenial
to Edgeworth, who was steeped in utilitarian moral philosophy” (p. xiii).
This was so notwithstanding the inability, inter alia, to settle conclusively
on the terms of the initial endowments.  This had several consequences,
each unpalatable to different economists: power governed efficiency,
interpersonal comparisons of utility needed to be made, and questions of
income and wealth distributions had logically to be determined prior to
market exchange even though income and wealth distributions were influenced
by market exchange. In working out/stabilizing solutions to this (and other)
problems of disciplinary construction, some aspects were retained and others
cast aside. For Knut Wicksell and others, for example, these factors provided
substantial opportunities for different theoretical constructions --
especially when presented in terms of indifference curves and contract
curves, further refashioning or remodeling the contract curve into what
Kenneth Boulding, the better part of a century later, thought should more
appropriately be called the conflict curve.  (Economists have had
enormous difficulty with topics into which enter both initial and
consequential distributions, e.g., both the Stigler and Coase versions of the
“Coase theorem.”)

The relationship between vision and
theory of exchange could easily be variably identified.  Experience with
increasingly market-organized economies could lead to a vision of action,
price determination, and interpersonal relationships which, in turn, could
lead to the centrality of a theory of exchange.  Conversely, it might
appear that the central focus should be on the determination of price/value
through exchange, a result of which would be transactions and hence “the
theory of bargain in a wide sense.”

One type of fastidious
mentality might require a single ultimate determinant of price understood as
value, e.g., labor command or embodied labor, or utility.  Another type
could provide for multiple potential sources, such as the price-theory model
which eventually became dominant, with the variables distributed in any
particular case among the categories of demand, supply, and irrelevant.

As Creedy writes: “The existence of a range of initial endowments
has important implications.  First, without introducing further
structure to the barter framework, it is not possible to say what the implied
rate of exchange is, given only information about the preferences and
endowments of individuals.  It results in ‘indeterminacy’ whereby
all that can be said is that the actual trade depends on the relative
bargaining strength of the traders” (p. xiv.).  Needless, perhaps, to
say, the identification of an economic reality of dependence of price
structure and resource allocation on the result of relative power, was
anathema to those who wanted to exclude considerations of power and any
connotation of an important role for government in managing the structure of
rights, because they sought either or both a “pure” economics or a
“laissez-faire” economic policy by government.  Both objectives
involved wishful-thinking.  To such economists, bargaining-power
theories of prices and wages were not only “bad” economics but they
opened the door to “bad” policy.  The eventual reconstruction of
economic theory along the lines of Kenneth Arrow, Gerard Debreu, Paul
Samuelson and others (though not Tjalling Koopmans) served to obfuscate the
non-uniqueness of price and resource allocation, thereby rendering dubious
the efficiency claims of the new welfare economics.  Koopmans
established a survival requirement for Pareto optimality, thereby negating
death as a marginal decision.  Not only did the adoption of the
indifference-curve technique fail to mollify every dissenter and even some
supporters, the institutionalist critique of the new welfare economics was
shown to have merit at fundamental levels. But most high theorists, while
personally/privately acknowledging the existence and impact of differential
power on economic performance, seemingly preferred to leave neither
themselves nor the discipline open to scrutiny and criticism. If law/rights
are a function of legal (legislative and judicial) action, and if changes in
relative rights led to (intentional and unintentional and/or
foreseen/expectable and unforeseen/unexpectable) changes in economic
performance, then actions by economic agents to influence if not capture the
putative regulatory agencies of government (through which the putative
rights, opportunities and exposures, and the existence, nature and structure
of markets are in part formed) meant that certain hitherto excluded topics
had to be included.

Reliance on utility led to the need to somehow
identify utility in a manner which seemed to not only organize the relevant
material properly but provided acceptable answers to questions about a
utilitarian approach.  It should be noted that such terms as
“properly” and “acceptably” refer either to some bargain among
participants or a social contract by their ancestors and not necessarily
agreement among philosophers.

One effect is to introduce
into the past, as the source of the present, the same problems encountered in
the present independent of the past, including, as we have seen,
opportunities for circular reasoning.

It was to the theory of
utility that Edgeworth surely felt that he was making his most fundamental
contribution in economics and would have preferred comprise the payoff of
some of his statistical work.  He was absorbed in controversies over the
measurement/measurability of utility, the relative meaningfulness of cardinal
and ordinal utility, the possibility of transcending that conflict using the
indifference curve, the nature of the utility function, the necessity of
establishing interpersonal comparisons of utility or welfare, the relevance
of the purpose to which the specific use of utility analysis would be made,
and so on.  Moreover, no small proportion of the animosity with which he
and others approached each other involved differences of opinion over the
foregoing issues.   This was the case with Leon Walras and Karl
Pearson.

Differences of opinion or of belief have existed to the
present day.  George Stigler was of the opinion that microeconomic
theory did not come of age until it became required for authors of journal
articles to stipulate utility functions.  Whether or not one believes
that such was another case of economic theory being led down a false track,
the following seems historically and epistemologically correct.
In and about 2000 many of the same issues remained unsettled and
unresolvable.  Economists continued to exercise a propensity to refer to
like-minded “authorities.” The result continues to resemble a carnival of
the animals, with several groups following elderly leaders, much as judges
cite favorable series of precedents.  In each case the function is the
same: to identify or claim an authority(ies) through the use of which to
assert positions or results.  Each new difference has elicited
variations on old assertions but assertions they nonetheless remain.

The development of much (I do not say all) economic theory in the
Edgeworthian period of its transformation was due to neither new fundamental
ideas nor to more sophisticated means of theory appraisal and choice nor
necessarily to more deeply knowledgeable economists.  It was due to
regarding, disregarding and weighting differently certain positions that had
been around for some time and continued to be discussed, from time to time,
for almost a century.

To emphasize Edgeworth’s brilliance and
eminence should not be to forget his failure to receive several academic
appointments to positions to which he had applied.  Three from 1881 were
to King’s College London (Philosophy), University College London (Political
Economy), and University College Liverpool (Logic, Mental and Moral
Philosophy and Political Economy) (see pp. 105-106, 128-129), his
disagreements with others on technical matters of economic and statistical
theory and their application, including with Marshall on the use of
mathematics (pp. 101, 148,189, 204, 207,215-216) and that for some years he
was poorly paid.

Barbé writes that: “Edgeworth’s connection
with King’s College London would span eleven years, from 1880 to 1890.
These King’s College lectures were poorly paid, and although his inherited
private income allowed him to survive comfortably, he repeatedly tried to
secure a better academic position.  However, in order to succeed, he
first needed to bolster his curriculum vitae and build a reputation in
academic circles through his publications” (p. 92)   I am not
sure what exactly to make of Barbé’s language.  Minimally, it may
signify merely the operation of the historic “publish or perish”
incentive and reward system.  It may indicate a concern of Edgeworth
about his consumption level or standard of living.  The period in
question was neither one of economic growth nor a stable level of employment
and income -- and the next ten to fifteen or so years were worse.  He
may either have changed the specifics of his status goal in life or come to
appreciate that he could make a name for himself. Certainly more information
is required as to the payment levels and policies in academia at the time, as
to whether those who made salary decisions appreciated his contributions and
potential, as to whether he hid his potential, perhaps inadvertently and (if
so) for what reason, how he fared in comparison with others at his level at
the time, and so on. Or perhaps he was a “late” bloomer.  And
possibly (for some interpreters, presumably) even if Edgeworth did not need
the money of a well-paid academic position, he would have wanted the status
(Hoover to Samuels idem).

[Kevin Hoover finds that “There is a
little contrariness and lack of charity in this [the foregoing]
paragraph.  ‘Private life,’ whatever else it could mean, does not
normally mean one’s intellectual or inner life, but one’s personal
relationships with other people (family, friends, lovers, etc.). Barbé’s
point seems clear enough to me. And in fact, I find my own intellectual life
to be wonderfully exciting, my ‘private life’ in the usual sense of that
term is dry as dust and would make a really poor novel (Hoover to Samuels
idem).]
I think that the difference between the professor whose
intellect and self-perception is unbound as to range and depth, given
training, experience, and innate ability in his or her enthusiasm and effort
exerted and the professor who at worst is faking being one and the professor
who allocates only so much effort as to qualify for promotion, tenure and
merit raises, is reasonably clear to their colleagues and students.
Members of all schools of economic thought may be found in all the foregoing
and still others.

It would be interesting, presumably, to know why
Mathematical Psychics did not acquire its eventual status much earlier
(though as recently as its centenary some thirty years ago, it was clear that
the book remained objectionable to many).  Barbé devotes some three
pages to reviews of the book published at the time it was published.
Edgeworth had distributed copies of the book to a number of people; some
authored and published reviews, some sent him letters with comments.

When one juxtaposes Mathematical Psychics to the economics and
social-science literature of the time, it is not inconceivable that it was
too strange, too demanding, too alien for those to whom any serious
consideration of utilitarianism or issues of equality versus inequality, or
the issues of power, right and peace, such as one can find in the work of
Thomas Hobbes and others, were repugnant, and so on. The book requires a high
degree of personal confidence, due to training and experience, in philosophy
and mathematics as well as economics/political economy.  It would not be
surprising if its disposition, by many who might have learned from it, was to
the class of books “talked about but never read,” such as, for example,
those of Adam Smith.

Conversely, it may be felt that Edgeworth’s
own eminence is at least in part due to the subsequent dominance of the type
of economics and statistics to which his work led, and then to the
explanation of the dominance.

One lesson of the foregoing is that
it is misleading to attribute the status of a scholar achieved late in his or
her career to an earlier stage. Another lesson is that it may be misleading
to attribute later developments and choices to earlier brilliant cognate
formulations.

As Creedy writes, “The importance of this
new justification of utilitarianism cannot be exaggerated” (p. xv).
Among the issues were: (1) the identity of utility maximization and its
utility in theory construction and policy, in part inasmuch as the term is a
primitive one (i.e., lacks specificity and is therefore inconclusive); (2)
the related existence of indeterminacy; ( 3) the use of a priori
probabilities; (4) the adoption of utility maximization within the welfare
economics of the Edgeworth box, with its assumption of utilitarianism as a
principle of justice, that, as Edgeworth himself put it, “in the
absence of any definite principle of selection, [an individual] has about as
good a chance of one of the arrangements as another” (p. xiv), i.e., equal
a priori probabilities, which requires that one easily can ignore the
enormous multiplicity of sources of inequality in life, including the
existence and structure of the control of government; (5) the “willingness
to accept ... utilitarian arbitration in terms of choice under
uncertainty”  (p. xiv); (6) the optimality of price under Paretian
theory; (7) the difference between an equilibrium and how it is achieved in
practice (p. xv); (8) whether recontracting can apply to whatever is thought
of as the “social contract” as well as to contracts for buying and
selling; (9) whether all individuals (or classes) can form coalitions to
improve their position, and which coalitions are and are not considered
collusion; and (10) the status of ontological assumptions or usages in
articulating utilitarianism (or any substitute) and of the assumptions on
which they rest vis-à-vis ignoring them and utilizing primitive terms (for
example, hedonism vis-à-vis other forms of utilitarianism) (cf. pp.
86-87).

Edgeworth is lauded by Barbé as a pioneer in the use of
Lagrangian multipliers and determinants (p. 96).  Barbé also refers to
an “important instrumental improvement” that leads to the coincidence of
lines of indifference (pp. 96-97) and to a mathematical proof of the greatest
happiness principle (p. 98).  But Barbé makes clear that Edgeworth also
tries to justify utilitarianism “by basing it on a ‘social contract’”
(p. 99) and by the use of definitions and mathematical constructions that are
esoteric and contrived (pp. 114-115).

Barbé treats “the
conceptual symmetry between the ‘calculus of feeling’ and the ‘calculus
of belief’” as amounting to a symmetry between utility and probability
(p. 110).   That, in my view is either a dead or a narrowing end
compared with late twentieth century linguistics and analyses of belief
systems.  On the other hand, the reconstruction of value theory (as
above) managed to disparage the Marxian and other socialist vision(s) which
had been the objective of at least a significant percentage of economists
from the beginning of the period of transformation.  That is, not all
esoteria have been treated equally.

Oddly, Barbé concludes that
“Edgeworth’s private life was quite devoid of memorable events” (p.
209).  I do not see how such a judgment can be sustained.
Edgeworth’s intellectual life was his private life. Every time that
Edgeworth entered a classroom to give a lecture, every time he worked on and
submitted a paper, every time he gave a paper at a professional meeting,
every time he opened an envelope with a paper submitted to the Economic
Journal, he savored a “memorable event.”  Barbé points to the
routine imposed by the annual academic cycle. Surely, there is more to
Barbé’s life, as I think there was to Edgeworth’s.

Be that as
it may, and notwithstanding the limitations and channeling imposed by the
availability of data for all biographers, Barbé’s work is a well-done,
almost unique study and it is a pleasure to recommend it to historians of
economic theory in particular.

Warren J. Samuels is
Professor Emeritus at Michigan State University.  His principal fields
of research and teaching were the history of economic thought and the
economic role of government.  His study, Essays on the Invisible Hand,
will be published by Cambridge University Press early in 2011.

(The author is indebted to Kevin Hoover and Steven G. Medema for unusually
insightful and helpful comments on an earlier draft of this review.)

Copyright (c) 2010 by EH.Net. All rights
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contact the EH.Net Administrator ([log in to unmask]). Published by EH.Net
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http://www.eh.net/BookReview.

Geographic Area: Europe
Subject: History of Economic Thought; Methodology
Time Period: 19th Century, 20th Century: Pre WWII

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