The Common Sense of Political Economy (Dodo Press)

Philip Henry Wicksteed (1844-1927) is known primarily as an economist. He was also an English Unitarian theologian, classicist, medievalist, and literary critic. Following his father into the Unitarian ministry in 1867, he embarked on an extraordinarily broad range of scholarly and theological explorations. His theological and ethical writings continued long after he left the pulpit, and appear to have been a starting-point for many of his other fields of scholarly inquiry. It was Wicksteed's theologically- driven interest in and concern for the ethics of modern commercial society, with its disturbing inequalities of wealth and income, which appear to have led him into his economic studies. In 1894, he published his celebrated An Essay on the Co-ordination of the Laws of Distribution, in which he sought to prove mathematically that a distributive system which rewarded factory-owners according to marginal productivity would exhaust the total product produced. But it was his 1910 The Common Sense of Political Economy which most comprehensively presents Wicksteed's economic system.