Leslie, T. E. Cliffe
Leslie, T. E. Cliffe
T. E. Cliffe Leslie (1827–1882), Irish sociologist and economist, was born in County Wexford and educated at Trinity College, Dublin. After graduation in 1847 he studied law in London, where he attended the lectures of Sir Henry Maine and was influenced by Maine’s emphasis on the historical approach to an understanding of institutions. He was a member of Lincoln’s Inn and of the Irish bar, but he never practiced. In 1853 he was appointed to the chair of jurisprudence and political economy at Queen’s College, Belfast, a post he held until his death. His academic duties required his presence in Belfast for only a few weeks in the year, and the larger part of the time he resided in London.
Leslie was a prolific writer of essays, most of which were reprinted. He never published a full-length book, and after his death a biographical sketch reported that while traveling on the Continent he had lost a partially completed manuscript of a comprehensive work on English economic and legal history. His first publication, in 1851, “Self-Dependence of the Working Classes Under the Law of Competition,” read before the Dublin Statistical Society, was a youthful performance along conventional lines. It stressed the force of competition and showed none of the originality or break with conventional economics which marked his later writing. In 1856 appeared the only one of his professorial lectures to be printed as such: The Military Systems of Europe Economically Considered, a defense of voluntary enlistment as against compulsory military service. His concern with military problems, both in their narrower economic aspects and in their broader historical and sociological bearing, continued for over a decade.
Beginning in the late 1860s Leslie’s writings were concentrated for several years on the land problem, particularly in Ireland. He opposed home rule for Ireland but championed land reform and was critical of what he called “insolent theories of race.” Drawing upon observations from several visits to the Continent, which brought him in close touch with the French economist and politician Léonce de Lavergne, he stressed the advantages of small agriculture holdings. In his views of the land problem he generally defended laissez-faire policies, and his emphasis was on elimination of legislative abuses in taxation and property rights rather than on positive policies of social welfare. He attacked entail and primogeniture, urged taxation more equitable to workers, and supported extension of the political franchise.
In the 1870s Leslie’s main interest turned to economic methodology, apparently as an outgrowth of a cross-fertilization between his studies of the land problem and the ideas of Sir Henry Maine. Leslie had, however, already attacked prevailing theory: in connection with a discussion of Irish conditions (1870 a), he had repudiated the wages fund doctrine, and he repeatedly criticized it as not squaring with the historical facts of wage determination. He criticized the “vicious abstraction that has done much to darken economic inquiry” (1879 a, p. 385), and he urged the importance of historical studies for an understanding of the workings of an economic system. In particular, he stressed that competition had not brought about the equalization that theory assumed, and he documented his thesis by repeated citations of geographical differences in agricultural wages in England and Ireland.
Leslie was an acute critic and a careful observer who was quick to see facts that did not square with the theories of classical economics. He did little, however, to present an organized alternative approach or to consider what modification of theory might explain these individual situations. Leslie is sometimes referred to as spokesman of the historical approach to economics in England, but this does not mean that he was part of an organized movement like the German historical school. His wide-ranging criticism of classical economics and his emphasis on the importance of institutions have much in common with the work of Thorstein Veblen.
Numerous references to Leslie by neoclassical economists in the 1880s and 1890s—in particular Henry Sidgwick, John Neville Keynes, and Alfred Marshall—suggest that he had some influence in softening the rigidity of the deductive economics of the classical tradition then dominant in England. His essays on the land problem are still important for the history of the controversy over the economic difficulties of Ireland, and his stimulating criticisms of the purely deductive approach to economics have timeless relevance.
Frank W. Fetter
[Directly related are the entries Economic thought,articles on THE HISTORICAL SCHOOL and THE INSTITUTIONAL SCHOOL. Other relevant material may be found in the biographies of Keynes, John Neville; Marshall; Sidgwick.]
WORKS BY LESLIE
1856 The Military Systems of Europe Economically Considered. Belfast: Shepherd & Aitchison.
1870 a Land Systems and Industrial Economy of Ireland, England, and Continental Countries. London: Long-mans.
(1870 b) 1881 The Land System of France. Pages 291–312 in Cobden Club, Systems of Land Tenure in Various Countries. New York and London: Cassell.
(1871) 1872 Financial Reform. Pages 189–263 in Cobden Club,Cobden Club Essays. Second Series. 2d ed. London: Cassell.
1879 a Essays in Political and Moral Philosophy. Dublin: Hodges & Figgis; London: Longmans.
(1879 b) 1888 Essays in Political Economy. Dublin: Hodges & Figgis; London: Longmans.
SUPPLEMENTARY BIBLIOGRAPHY
Keynes, John N. (1890) 1955 The Scope and Method of Political Economy. 4th ed. New York: Kelley.
Marshall, Alfred (1890) 1961 Principles of Economics. 9th ed. New York and London: Macmillan.
Mill, John Stuart (1870) 1875 Professor Leslie on the Land Question. Volume 5, pages 95–121 in John Stuart Mill, Dissertations and Discussions: Political, Philosophical, and Historical. New York: Holt. & First published in Volume 13 of the Fortnightly Review.
Politico-Economical Heterodoxy: Cliffe Leslie. 1883 Westminster Review 120:470–500.
Sidgwick, Henry 1879 Economic Method.Fortnightly Review New Series 25:301–318.