MOUNTIFORT LONGFIELD

Lectures in Political Economy. Dublin 1834 First Edition

Longfield’s remarkable lectures – a ‘neglected British Economist’

LONGFIELD,Mountifort
Lectures on Political Economy, delivered in Trinity and Michaelmas Terms, 1833.
Dublin, William Curry, Jun, and Company 1834

Octavo, contemporary cloth backed boards with loss of original paper to boards, printed paper label rubbed, pp.xii, 267, without the half title, a good copy.


Blaug: Great Economists before Keynes, pp.135-137. Seligman: On some neglected British Economists, 1903, pp.46-52. Schumpeter: History of Economic Analysis, pp.464-465. See L.S.Moss: Mountifort Longfield: Irelands first Professor of Poltical Economy, 1976. Kress C3771. Goldsmith 28434. Not in Bradshaw Collection of Irish Books, Cambridge University Library.

FIRST EDITION by Samuel Mountifort Longfield, who was Ireland’s first Professor of the Whateley Chair of Political Economy at Trinity College, Dublin.
“Longfield’s general theory of value is noteworthy in that he not only puts very lucidly the influence of cost of production upon the supply side of the equation between supply and demand, but calls attention to the demand side as well...Longfield uses profits in the sense of general returns to capital, and that his theory of profits is really a theory of interest...In his theory of wages also he marks a decided advance...’the wages of the labourer depend upon the value of his labour, and not upon his wants, whether natural or acquired.’” Seligman
“Longfield’s Lectures is an amazingly original if somewhat confusingly written book, which sketches a subjective theory of value and a marginal productivity theory – all this in 1834, 11 years after the death of Ricardo. Longfield had the idea of marginal demand price and favoured utility rather than labour as the basis of exchange value but he failed, like everyone before him, to discover the concept of marginal utility as the link between utility and demand.” Blaug
“Longfield’s merits may be summed up by saying he overhauled the whole of economic theory and produced a system that would have stood up well in 1890....his argument against the labour theory of value is one of the best ever penned...he anticipated the essentials of Bohm-Bawerk’s theory (by making the ‘roundabout’ process of production the pivot of his analysis of capital). And he presented a reasonably complete and reasonably correct theory of distribution based upon the marginal productivity principle, not only the marginal cost principle...” Schumpeter.

£2,250