John Kells Ingram - Academic Contributions

Academic Contributions

Ingram was active in the fields of archaeology, the classics, economics, etymology, law, literature, mathematics. medieval manuscripts, poetry, religious speculation and Shakespearean criticism.

• Economics
  • He was not a trained economist per se, but rather a sociologist and his early economic writings dealt mainly with the Poor Law.
  • He was a spokesman for historical economics in Britain. Ingram influenced and was respected by many contemporary social and economic thinkers at that time in Great Britain. America and continental Europe. His attack on classical economics encompassed its methodology and its conclusions.
  • He played an important role in the English Methodenstreit (Battle of methods), (closely associated with the Werturteilsstreit). It was a methodological debate between orthodox and historical economists, that took place 1865-1914, by articulating a Comtean variant of historists conceptual framework that earlier had been made popular by Cliffe Leslie. Methodenstreit and Werturteilsstreit meant that social science should be value-free. In Germany, Gustav von Schmoller recognized explicitly the importance of responding to policy questions with the foundation of the Verein für Sozialpolitik in 1872.

• Literature
  • He wrote extensively on Shakespearean syntax.
  • He did much useful work in advancing the science of classical etymology, notably in his Greek and Latin Etymology in England.
  • He also wrote the entries on sumptuary laws and slavery.
  • Furthermore he wrote effusive poems and some Gothic fiction short stories, like The pirate's revenge ... or Amelia Somers ....

• Archaeology
  • Ingram wrote papers on Mexican antiques.

• Mathematics
  • He contributed many important papers to mathematical societies on differential calculus and geometrical analysis.