Nassau William Senior

He was born at Compton, Berkshire, the eldest son of Rev. J. R. Senior, vicar of Durnford, Wiltshire.[1] He was educated at Eton College and Magdalen College, Oxford; at university he was a private pupil of Richard Whately, afterwards Archbishop of Dublin with whom he remained connected by ties of lifelong friendship. He took the degree of B.A. in 1811 and became a Vinerian Scholar in 1813.

Senior went into the field of conveyancing, with a pupilage under Edward Burtenshaw Sugden. When Sugden rather abruptly informed his pupils in 1816 that he was concentrating on chancery work, Senior took steps to qualify as a Certified Conveyancer, which he did in 1817. With one other pupil, Aaron Hurrill, he then took over Sugden's practice.[2][3] Senior was called to the bar in 1819, but problems with public speaking limited his potential career as an advocate. In 1836, during the chancellorship of Lord Cottenham, he was appointed a master in chancery.

On the foundation of the Drummond professorship of political economy at Oxford in 1825, he was elected to fill the chair, which he occupied until 1830 and again from 1847 to 1852. In 1830, he was requested by Lord Melbourne to inquire into the state of combinations and strikes, report on the state of the law and suggest improvements.

Senior was a member of the Poor Law Inquiry Commission of 1832, and of the Royal Commission of 1837 on handloom weavers. The report of the latter, published in 1841, was drawn up by him and had the substance of the report he had prepared some years earlier, on combinations and strikes.

Senior became a good friend of Alexis de Tocqueville (1805–1859) whom he met in 1833 for the first time before the publishing of Democracy in America.[4]

Senior was in the spring of 1849 legal advisor and counsellor to Jenny Lind, who then was performing in London. She intended to marry a soldier named Harris, and Senior was supposed to draw up marriage settlements. Harriet Grote in correspondence calls him Claudius Harris, a lieutenant of the Madras Cavalry; the Grote connection was that he was the brother of the wife of Joseph Grote, the brother of her husband, George.[5][6] Senior accompanied Lind and Harriet Grote to Paris (amid civil strife and a cholera epidemic).[7] The marriage failed to take place.[8]

Senior was "indirectly responsible for the contract which Jenny Lind condescended to sign in 1850 with the American promoter P. T. Barnum".[9][10]

Senior was one of the commissioners appointed in 1864 to inquire into popular education in England. He died at Kensington that year.

Senior was a contributor to the Quarterly Review, Edinburgh Review, London Review and North British Review. In their pages, he dealt with literary as well as with economic and political subjects. The London Review was a project of Senior from 1828, for a quarterly periodical. It was backed by Richard Whately and others of the Oriel Noetics, and with the help of Thomas Mayo, he found an editor in Joseph Blanco White. Early contributions from John Henry Newman, Edwin Chadwick and Senior himself (on the Waverley novels and William Jacob's views) were not enough to establish it, and it ceased publication in mid-1829.[11]

Senior regarded political economy as a deductive science, of inferences from four elementary propositions, which are not assumptions but facts. It concerns itself, however, with wealth only and can therefore give no political advice. He pointed out inconsistencies of terminology in David Ricardo's works: for example, his use of value in the sense of cost of production, high and low wages in the sense of a certain proportion of the product as dilute amount and his employment of the epithets fixed and circulating as applied to capital. He argued, too, that in some cases the premises assumed by Ricardo are false. He cited the assertions that rent depends on the difference of fertility of the different portions of land in cultivation; that the laborer always receives precisely the necessaries or what custom leads him to consider the necessaries, of life; that as wealth and population advance, agricultural labor becomes less and less proportionately productive and therefore the share of the produce taken by the landlord and the laborer must constantly increase, but that taken by the capitalist must constantly diminish. He denied the truth of all the propositions.

Besides adopting some terms, such as that of natural agents, from Jean-Baptiste Say, Senior introduced the term "abstinence" to express the conduct of the capitalist that is remunerated by interest. He added some considerations to what had been said by Adam Smith on the division of labor and distinguished between the rate of wages and the price of labor but assumed a determinate wage-fund.

Senior's 1837 Letters on the Factory Act have become notorious for the analytical mistake made in them. Nassau opposed the Child Labour Law and the proposed Ten Hours Act, on the grounds that they would make it impossible for factory owners to make profits. In Senior's analysis of factory production, capital advanced means of subsistence (wage) to the workers, who would then return the advance during the first 10½ hours of their labor, producing a profit only in the last hour. What Senior failed to realize is that the turnover of capital stock depends on the length of the working day; he assumed it constant.[15]

In Karl Marx's first volume of Capital, Senior's analyses are subjected to a series of exacting criticisms. "If, giving credence to the out-cries of the manufacturers, he believed that the workmen spend the best part of the day in the production, i.e., the reproduction or replacement of the value of the buildings, machinery, cotton, coal, &c.," Marx writes, "then his analysis was superfluous."[16]

Senior modified his opinions on population in the course of his career and asserted that in the absence of disturbing causes, subsistence may be expected to increase in a greater ratio than population. Charles Périn argued that he set up "egoism" as the guide of practical life. Thomas Edward Cliffe Leslie attacked the abstraction implied in the phrase "desire of wealth".

Senior reportedly said of the Great Irish Famine of 1845

"would not kill more than one million people, and that would scarcely be enough to do any good".[17]

That is a point quoted by theorists who propose that the actions of the British government before and during the famine were tantamount to deliberate genocide, but his opinion was not government policy. Costigan[18] argues, however, that the quote is taken out of context and reflects Senior's opinion purely from the viewpoint of the theory of political economy; in other words, even such a large reduction in the population would not solve the underlying economic, social and political problems, which would be proved correct. He argues that Senior made attempts over many years to improve the lot of the Irish people, even at considerable personal cost (in 1832, he was removed, after one year in office, from his position as Professor of Political Economy at King's College, London, for supporting the Catholic Church in Ireland). In his letter [19] of 8 January 1836 to Lord Howick, Senior wrote,

With respect to the ejected tenantry, the stories that are told make one's blood boil. I must own that I differ from most persons as to the meaning of the words 'legitimate influence of property'. I think that the only legitimate influence is example and advice, and that a landlord who requires a tenant to vote in opposition to the tenant's feeling of duty is the suborner of a criminal act.'

Senior's notes of his visits to Birr, County Offaly in the 1850s mention his surprise and concern that the everyday lifestyle of the Irish poor had changed so little, despite the famine disaster.

Though the aspect of Ireland is somewhat changed since 1852, and much since 1844, I doubt whether any great real alteration in the habits to feelings of the people has taken place. They still depend mainly on the potato. They still depend rather on the occupation of land, than on the wages of labour. They still erect for themselves the hovels in which they dwell. They are still eager to subdivide and to sublet. They are still the tools of their priests, and the priests are still ignorant of the economical laws on which the welfare of the labouring classes depends.[20]

Nonetheless, while preparing his manuscript for his posthumously published Journals, Conversations and Essays Relating to Ireland (London: Longmans, Green, 1868. 2 vols.), Senior reiterates his satisfaction over, and takes credit for, having supported or even helped shape some of the most destructive Famine-era policies. For example, Senior deems the Irish Poor Law "the best which any country has ever adopted" (Senior, 1868, p. 1:xi). He looks back from 1861 to Ireland of the 1830s and 1840s with pleasure at the diminishment of Ireland's "ferocious" trade-unions (ibid., 1:viii-ix). He believes Ireland's Roman Catholics to be still "the tools of their priests"; still "hostile to Government"; still "enemies of emigration" and of "every improving landlord" (ibid.). Senior also asserts that Ireland is governed by "two codes." One, a code shaped by Acts of Parliament and implemented in Ireland by duly elected officials. The other Irish code is "laid down by tenants, and enforced by assassination" (ibid., 1:xi). Finally, whatever good Parliamentary laws may have done in Famine and post-Famine Ireland, they would have failed had not millions of Irish died or departed during the Famine: "these measures, beneficial as they were, would have been powerless if the population of Ireland had continued to increase, or had even remained stationary at its amount in 1841" (ibid., p.1:xii). At the end of his life, Senior looks back with satisfaction at the diminishment of Irish lives from "8,175,124" million in 1841 to "5,764,543" million in 1861 (ibid.). Catherine Nealy Judd

Senior married Mary Charlotte Mair of Iron Acton, Gloucestershire, in 1821. Their daughter, the memoirist Mary Charlotte Mair Simpson (1825–1907) acted as his literary executor. Their son Nassau John Senior (1822–1891), was a lawyer and married Jane Elizabeth Senior (1828–1877), an inspector of workhouses and schools.[21]

• Abstinence theory of interest

• Levy, S. Leon (1943). Nassau W. Senior, The Prophet of Modern Capitalism, Boston, Massachusetts: Bruce Humphries. OCLC 730126628
• Levy, S. Leon (1970). Nassau W. Senior 1790–1864, Newton Abbot : David & Charles. OCLC 463277765
• Smith, George H. (2008). "Senior, Nassau William (1790–1864)". In Hamowy, Ronald (ed.). The Encyclopedia of Libertarianism. Thousand Oaks, California: SAGE; Cato Institute. pp. 457–58. doi:10.4135/9781412965811.n279. ISBN 978-1-4129-6580-4. LCCN 2008009151. OCLC 750831024.

Wikisource has original works written by or about: Nassau William Senior

• Works by Nassau William Senior at Project Gutenberg
• Works by or about Nassau William Senior at Internet Archive
• Nassau William Senior, Online Library of Liberty