Utilitarianism, the Moral Sciences and Political Economy: Mill-Grote-Sidgwick

While it is generally believed that Marshall sought to diminish the economics of Jevons in setting out his own, little attention has been paid to the original, Millian, contexts in which both Jevons and Marshall turned to the study of political economy. Jevons’s first 1862 paper seems to have been prompted by the publication in 1861 of Mill’s account of utilitarianism; at the same time in Cambridge John Grote, Knightbridge Professor of Moral Philosophy, and a young Henry Sidgwick, Knightbridge Professor from 1883, were engaged in lively discussion of Mill’s arguments. Grote died in 1866, but the Grote Club continued to meet and it was in this context that Marshall met Sidgwick. Grote’s Critique of Mill, An Examination of the Utilitarian Philosophy (1870), and Sidgwick’s Methods of Ethics (1874) can be read in the light of these arguments of the 1860s, as can also Sidgwick’s own Principles of Political Economy (1883), which made use of Jevons’s conception of final utility. This Cambridge context sheds a new light on any differences between Jevons and Marshall.