Thomas Edward Cliffe Leslie

Thomas Edward Cliffe Leslie (21 June 1825

T. E. Cliffe Leslie was born in the county of Wexford, the second son of the Rev. Edward Leslie, prebendary of Dromore, and rector of Annahilt, in the county of Down. His family was of Scottish descent, but had been connected with Ireland since the reign of Charles I. Amongst his ancestors were John Leslie (1571–1671), bishop first of Raphoe and afterwards of Clogher, and the bishop's son Charles Leslie.^[3]

Cliffe Leslie received his elementary education from his father, who resided in England, though holding church preferment and some landed property in Ireland. His father taught him Latin, Greek and Hebrew at an unusually early age. Afterwards, for a short time he was under the care of a clergyman at Clapham, and was then sent to King William's College, in the Isle of Man.^[3]

He entered the

In 1860 he collected a number of his essays, adding several new ones, into a volume entitled Land Systems and Industrial Economy of Ireland, England and Continental Countries. JS Mill gave a full account of the contents of this work in a paper in the Fortnightly Review, in which he pronounced Leslie to be one of the best living writers on applied political economy. Mill had sought his acquaintance on reading his first article in Macmillan's Magazine; he admired his talents, took pleasure in his society, and treated him with a respect and kindness which Leslie always gratefully acknowledged.^[4]

In the frequent visits which Leslie made to the continent, especially to

Leslie's work falls into two categories: applied political economy and the discussion of the philosophical method of the science. The Land Systems and Industrial Economy of Ireland, England and Continental Countries belonged principally to the former division. Two essays of Leslie's appeared in volumes published under the auspices of the

In 1879 the provost and senior fellows of Trinity College published for him a volume in which a number of these articles were collected under the title of Essays in Political and Moral Philosophy. These and some later essays, together with the earlier volume on Land Systems, form the essential contribution of Leslie to economic literature. He had long contemplated, and had in part written, a work on English economic and legal history, which would have been his magnum opus, a more substantial fruit of his genius and his labours than anything he has left. But the manuscript of this treatise, after much pains had already been spent on it, was unaccountably lost at Nancy in 1872; and, though he hoped to be able speedily to reproduce the missing portion and finish the work, no material was left in a state fit for publication. What the nature of it would have been may be gathered from an essay on the History and Future of Profit in the Fortnightly Review for November 1881, which is believed to have been in substance an extract from it.^[5]

That he was able to do so much may well be a subject of wonder when it is known that his labours had long been impeded by a painful and depressing malady, from which he suffered severely at intervals, whilst he never felt secure from its recurring attacks. To this disease he in the end succumbed at Belfast, on 27 January 1882.^[5]

Cliffe Leslie emphasised the land question as a central issue for the social welfare of both Ireland and England. This volume has both a breadth of view and a rich variety of illustrative detail. His general purpose was to show that the territorial systems of both countries were so encumbered with historical elements of a feudal origin as to be altogether unfit to serve the purposes of a modern industrial society. The policy he recommended is summed up in the following:^[5]

Had there been in England a simple jurisprudence relating to land, a law of equal intestate succession, a prohibition of entail, a legal security for tenants' improvements, an open registration of title and transfer, a considerable number of peasant properties, the rural economy of England would long since have created unanswerable objections to the Irish land system in the public mind.—The Land Systems, ed. 1870, p. 2

Much of Cliffe Leslie's work concerned the problems of Ireland. He rejected

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.[5] 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

[Economics'] 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.^[6]

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.^[7]

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.^[5]

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

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.[10]

Works

• The Military Systems of Europe Economically Considered (1856)
• "Political Economy and the Rate of Wages", Fraser's Magazine (15 July 1868); Reprinted in Land Systems... (1870) pp. 357–379. On line.
• Land Systems and Industrial Economy of Ireland, England and Continental Countries, London, Longmans, Green (1860); new edition, (1870)
  ISBN 0-678-00346-7
• The Love of Money (1862) Reprinted in Essays in Political Economy, cited below, p. 189.
• "The Political Economy of Adam Smith", Fortnightly Review (1 November 1870)
• Financial Reform, Cobden Club Essays, 2nd Series (1871)
• "The History of German Political Economy", Fortnightly Review (1 July 1875)
• "On the Philosophical Method of Political Economy", Hermathena, Dublin University (1876)
• The Land System of France, Cobden Club Essays (1876)
• "Political Economy and Sociology", Fortnightly Review (1 January 1879)
• Essays in Political and Moral Philosophy, Dublin and London, Hodges, Foster & Figgis and Longmans, Green (1879)
• Essays in Political Economy, Dublin, Hodges, Figgis & Co. (1879, 1888)
• "Political Economy in the United States", Fortnightly Review (1 October 1880)
• "The Irish Land Question", Appleton's Journal (1881)
• "History and Future of Profit", Fortnightly Review (November 1881)

References