Cambridge Economics (2008)

Abstract

Maynard Keynes called Thomas Robert Malthus, ‘the first of the Cambridge economists’. He provided a brilliant description of Malthus’s approach: Malthus was above all, a great pioneer of the application of a frame of formal thinking to the complex confusion of the world of daily events. Malthus approached the central problems of economic theory by the best of all routes. He began … as a philosopher and moral scientist, … brought up in the Cambridge of Paley, applying the à priori method of the political philosopher. He then immersed himself … in the facts of economic history and of the contemporary world, applying the methods of historical induction and filling his mind with a mass of the material of experience … finally he returned … to the pure theory of the economist proper, and sought … to impose the methods of formal thought on the material presented by events, … to penetrate these events with understanding by a mixture of intuitive selection and formal principle and thus to interpret the problem and propose the remedy

Originally published in Peter Pagnamenta (ed.), The University of Cambridge: An 800th Anniversary Portrait, London: Third Millennium Publishing, 2008, pp. 168–71.