Lionel Robbins on Philip Wicksteed

“PHILIP HENRY WICKSTEED, the author of the Common Sense of Political Economy and the other works collected in these volumes, was one of the most remarkable intellectual figures of the half-century which has just past.  He was a leading member of the Unitarian ministry.  He was one of the foremost mediæval scholars of his time.  He was an economist of international reputation.  He was a savant who made contributions of permanent value to highly technical branches of knowledge.  He was a teacher who, without vulgarisation, succeeded in making intelligible to many the main significance of the various fields of learning in which he moved.  There can be few men who have so successfully combined such a wide range of intellectual pursuits with such conspicuous excellence in each of them.”

“Wicksteed's first contribution to theoretical Economics was an application of the Jevonian analysis to the criticism of the Marxian theory of value—an article on Das Kapital which appeared in the socialist journal, To-Day, in October, 1884.  The article is not merely a criticism; it is an independent exposition of the new theory which carries it further forward and, on more than one point, adds important new corollaries, The Labour Theory is shown to be false.  The cases which it appears to explain are explained more convincingly as special instances of a more comprehensive theory.  …  It was the first scientific criticism of Marx's theory—written years before Böhm-Bawerk's or Pareto's—and in some respects it remains the most decisive.  The argument is developed with the ease and certainty of a man who is completely sure of himself, not because of any self-deception or premature synthesis, but because he has mastered the essential material.  Mr. George Bernard Shaw, at that time a Marxian Socialist, made a controversial reply; but as Mr. Shaw, who, as he has subsequently related,1 was eventually persuaded by Wicksteed that he was wrong, would be the first to admit, the significance of his reply lay not so much in what it itself contained, but rather in the fact that it elicited further elucidations of Jevons.2  It is, perhaps, worth noting that Wicksteed's rejoinder contains one of the earliest recognitions of the relative nature of the concepts invoked by the utility theory of value.”