Thomas Edward Cliffe Leslie - Method

Method

Cliffe Leslie defended the inductive method in political economy, against the attempt to deduce the economic phenomena of a society from the so-called universal principle of the desire of wealth. Of course, English empiricism has a long tradition, dating from David Hume and Francis Bacon. Leslie was of this empirical tendency of British economic thought. He said that

fundamental laws ought to be obtained by careful induction, that assumptions from which an unreal order of things and unreal uniformities are deduced cannot be regarded as final or adequate ; and that facts, instead of being irrelevant to the economist's reasoning, are the phenomena from which he must infer his general principles, and by which he ought constantly to verify his deductions.

Further, he spoke of the

...necessity of studying every economic problem in conformity with the universal canons of the logic of science -- of accepting no assumptions as finally established without proof, none as adequate from which conclusions untrue as matters of fact are found to result, and no chains of deduction from hypothetical premises as possessing more than hypothetical truth, until verified by observation.

The first influence which impelled Cliffe Leslie in the direction of the historical and comparative institutional methods was that of Sir Henry Maine, himself a student of historical jurisprudence as represented by Savigny. Maine's Ancient Law (1861) is famous for the thesis that law and society developed "from status to contract". Maine's personal teaching of jurisprudence, as well as the example of his writings, led Cliffe Leslie to look at the present economic structure and state of society as the result of a long evolution. Of the German economists who represent similar tendencies, only perhaps Roscher was an influence. And the writings of Comte, whom he admired though critically, must have powerfully co-operated to form in him the habit of regarding economic science as only a single branch of sociology.

The earliest writing in which Leslie's revolt against the so-called orthodox school distinctly appears is his Essay on Wages, first published in 1868 and reproduced as an appendix to the volume on Land Systems. In this, after criticism of the Wages-Fund doctrine and the lack of agreement between its results and the observed phenomena, he concludes by declaring that political economy must be an inductive, instead of a purely deductive science. By this change, it will gain in utility, interest and real truth far more than a full compensation for the forfeiture of a fictitious title to mathematical exactness and certainty. But it is in the essays collected in the volume of 1879 that his attitude in relation to the question of method is most decisively marked. In one of these, on the political economy of Adam Smith, he exhibits in a very interesting way the co-existence in The Wealth of Nations of historical-inductive investigation in the manner of Montesquieu with a priori speculation founded on theologico-metaphysical bases, and points out the error of ignoring the former element, which is the really characteristic feature of Smith's social philosophy, and places him in strong contrast with the school of Ricardo.

The essay, however, which contains the most brilliant polemic against the orthodox school, as well as the most luminous account and the most powerful vindication of the new direction, was that of which we have above spoken as having first appeared in Hermathena. It may be recommended as supplying the best extant presentation of one of the two contending views of economic method. On this essay mainly rests the claim of Leslie to be regarded as the founder and first head of the English historical school of political economy. Those who share his views on the philosophical constitution of the science regard the work he did, notwithstanding its unsystematic character, as in reality the most important done by any English economists in the latter half of the 19th century. But even the warmest partisans of the older school acknowledge that he did excellent service by insisting on a kind of inquiry, previously too much neglected, which was of the highest interest and value, in whatever relation it might be supposed to stand to the establishment of economic truth. The members of both groups alike recognized his great learning, his patient and conscientious habits of investigation and the large social spirit in which he treated the problems of his science.

Cliffe Leslie insisted on an inductive, historical and institutional approach, which was in vogue in the late-Nineteenth Century. Even so, a recent assessment views his work in applied economics as complementary to contemporary theoretical work.