"We propose in the following Treatise to give an outline of the Science which treats of the Nature, the Production, and the Distribution of Wealth. To that Science we give the name of Political Economy"
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Senior’s opening move is a land grab. By announcing an “outline of the Science” that will explain the “Nature, the Production, and the Distribution of Wealth,” he isn’t just describing a book; he’s staking a claim that these messy, conflict-ridden questions can be disciplined into something with rules, boundaries, and authority. Calling it “Science” is the key rhetorical lever. It promises cool-headed clarity at a moment when industrial capitalism is overheating British society - swelling cities, reorganizing labor, and turning poverty and profit into political emergencies.
The phrasing does quiet ideological work. “We propose” sounds modest and collective, but it also establishes a gatekeeping “we”: the educated class defining the terms on which wealth will be discussed. “Treats of” suggests an impartial physician examining an organism, not a partisan in a struggle. Even the triad - nature, production, distribution - smuggles in a worldview: wealth is something that can be understood as if it were a system, not merely a consequence of power. Once you frame distribution as a technical problem inside a “science,” it becomes easier to downgrade moral outrage into variables and incentives.
Naming matters, too. “Political Economy” deliberately fuses two volatile domains: governance and money. Senior is implicitly arguing that the state cannot avoid economic questions, but also that economic reasoning should discipline politics. In the 19th-century British context - reform debates, Poor Laws, labor agitation - this is an attempt to professionalize argument and, not incidentally, to make certain policy conclusions feel less like choices and more like necessities. The sentence is a passport stamp: economics entering public life as expertise.
The phrasing does quiet ideological work. “We propose” sounds modest and collective, but it also establishes a gatekeeping “we”: the educated class defining the terms on which wealth will be discussed. “Treats of” suggests an impartial physician examining an organism, not a partisan in a struggle. Even the triad - nature, production, distribution - smuggles in a worldview: wealth is something that can be understood as if it were a system, not merely a consequence of power. Once you frame distribution as a technical problem inside a “science,” it becomes easier to downgrade moral outrage into variables and incentives.
Naming matters, too. “Political Economy” deliberately fuses two volatile domains: governance and money. Senior is implicitly arguing that the state cannot avoid economic questions, but also that economic reasoning should discipline politics. In the 19th-century British context - reform debates, Poor Laws, labor agitation - this is an attempt to professionalize argument and, not incidentally, to make certain policy conclusions feel less like choices and more like necessities. The sentence is a passport stamp: economics entering public life as expertise.
Quote Details
| Topic | Wealth |
|---|---|
| Source | Nassau William Senior, An Outline of the Science of Political Economy (1836), opening/introduction — definition of political economy as the science of the nature, production, and distribution of wealth. |
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