Selling Plutology: Correspondence Relating to the Failure of Australia's First Economics Text (Essay‪)‬

I know not what accidental circumstance, the distant residence of the author, or the unfortunate selection of a title, for instance, has diverted attention from the singular excellence and independence of his work. W.S. Jevons on W.E. Hearn's Plutology (1871: 265). William Edward Hearn's Plutology was printed in Melbourne by Wilson and Mackinnon in 1863 and then bound and distributed in Melbourne in the same year through the publishing house of George Robertson and in London in 1864 through the publishing house of Macmillan and Co. Historians of economic thought have correctly portrayed this book as one of the most important economic tracts to appear in the Australian colonies during the nineteenth century. Admittedly many of these same historical authorities have followed the lead of Hearn's most important and meticulous biographer, J.A. La Nauze (1949), in questioning the originality of many of the doctrines contained in Plutology, but at no time do they explicitly qualify the received view that this book was one of Australia's most important contributions to the field of political economy during the Victorian age (Copland 1935:9; Hutchison 1953:64; Blainey 1957:49-1; Green 1961:321; La Nauze 1972; Groenewegen and McFarlane 1990:2,51).1 The prevailing opinion that the publication of Plutology signified a highpoint in the pioneering stage of Antipodean political economy rests partly on direct comparisons of this text with the usual dross that was passed off as economic analysis in the colonies at this time and partly on the glowing (and now commonly cited) references to this text made by three of the most important late-Victorian political economists: William Stanley Jevons, Alfred Marshall and Francis Ysidro Edgeworth. Jevons provided an early 'anonymous' notice of Plutology in The Spectator in which he emphasised its innovative focus on the way effort is harnessed to satisfy human wants (5 March 1864); he praised it again in The Coal Question for its soundness and originality ([1865] 1906:168); and, most significantly, he magnanimously devoted an entire section of the concluding chapter of the Theory of Political Economy to spelling out its pathbreaking qualities ([1879] 1931:273; see also various entries in Black 197381). Marshall, on the other hand, advised the future Mrs Marshall and other students who attended his Cambridge lectures in the early to mid-1870s to read Plutology as an introductory text (1947:20); he (with Mrs Marshall) made reference to Hearn in a footnote in Economics and Industry as one of a number of economists who adhered to the notion that wages were determined by demand and supply (1879:205n); and he argued in all of the many editions of the Principles that Plutology was at 'once simple and profound' ([1890] 1920:91). Edgeworth echoed these views in his entry on Hearn for Palgrave's Dictionary of Political Economy, where he wrote that Plutology was a model of classical style and that, 'like Hermann or Ricardo, Hearn holds an intermediate course between the highest abstraction and mere information, neither soaring to mathematical analysis nor creeping among historical details' (1896:295).