Harriet Martineau's Empiricism
In: History of political economy, Volume 56, Issue 2, p. 259-289
ISSN: 1527-1919
Abstract
In 1832 Harriet Martineau began writing a series of fictional tales intended to illustrate the principles of political economy. By 1834 monthly sales numbers for the series were prolific and Martineau was gaining an international reputation. The Illustrations of Political Economy has long been read as advancing a simplistic popular Ricardianism that spoke powerfully to its immediate audience but became obsolete within just a few decades. This article complicates these assumptions by showing how the tales take a Malthusian stance on questions regarding the proper scope and method of economic science and hence anticipate the inductivist and historicist critiques of Ricardian economics that Malthus inspired. The process by which she conducted research for the tales and the process by which her characters learn economic lessons resemble the inductive process that the Cambridge inductivists and later the English historical economists posited as an alternative to the abstract and deductive method they associated with Ricardo. These tales also reveal how cultural, religious, and historical forces influence economic life and economic decision-making, suggesting that, as the inductive and historical economists often argued, understanding these forces was essential to arriving at a true understanding of political economy.
