Benjamin Jowett's Connections with Political Economy

Benjamin Jowett (1817-1893) was one of the leading figures in English university educaon in the late nineteenth century. As the translator and interpreter of Plato he was an minent Greek scholar in an educational establishment still dominated by classical studies. is Master of Balliol College, Oxford he was perhaps the best-known educator, or educaonal administrator, in the United Kingdom. Earlier in his career he had been a conoversial liberal Anglican theologian. But Jowett also had a life-long interest in and onnections with Political Economy. The objectives of this paper are, first, to bring )gether what is known of Jowett in relation to Political Economy and, second, to report n the further insight to be gained from attention to his Notebook of 1841. Eventually Regius professor of Greek at Oxford, Jowett was associated with Balliol College from his undergraduate years to his death. He was made a fellow in 1838 while till an undergraduate. He received the B.A. in 1839, in 1842 he received both the M.A. nd a tutorship. He became Master in 1870. (For further biographical details, see DNB, aber, Marshall, and Wintle.) It was he who brought Alfred Marshall to Oxford from Jniversity College, Bristol in 1884, where he stayed one year prior to becoming pro:ssor of political economy at Cambridge as successor to Henry Fawcett. (See, for xample, Abbott and Campbell, II, 246: "This change was a source of great pleasure nd gratification to Jowett, who not only secured a very able Lecturer, but brought a riend to Oxford.") His continued friendship with Mary and Alfred Marshall produced sveral letters which, as we will see, are of some interest. As Marshall noted in his affectionate obituary of Jowett, Jowett "gave short courses f set lectures on political economy" in the decades before he became Master; thereafter e continued to tutor individual or small groups of students in the field. Marshall noted lat Jowett "made no claim to be an economist in any special sense of the word. But e took great interest in political economy, especially on its social side; . . ." Marshall, 745). Marshall also noted that Jowett "was not without influence over the conomic thought of the present generation." Many years later, Alvin Johnson, who ame from a Nebraska farm, wrote that "As a student I was deeply interested in Jowett, ilth his faithfully sophisticated Plato . . ." (Johnson, 97) Another writer, who also knew awett personally, reported that "Jowett once said in his odd way: 'I thought once of iving myself up to political economy, but I happened to become Professor of Greek'" Ibllemache, 10). However, Abbott and Campbell reported that "a few years" after iving "a course of lectures on the 'new science' of Political Economy, which he had een studying since 1841 . . . he was wont to observe that Political Economy, like Benlamism, had done its work" (Abbott and Campbell, I, 131). This same view is presented y his more recent biographer who remarks that Jowett "read the economists of his me, and even lectured upon political economy, though he erroneously supposed that was a branch of thought which had exhausted its possibilities" (Faber, 184-185). Marshall's view seems the more accurate, although, as we shall see, Jowett had a eep sense of the limits of economic analysis. In 1861 Jowett lighly cautioned a Miss !obbe that she ought "not go to war with Political Economy." As reasons he offered (1) Because the Political Economists are a powerful and dangerous class; (2) Because is impossible for ladies and gentlemen to fill up the interstices of legislation if they