Politics & Power Quote by Nassau William Senior

Senior is doing something sly here: he opens by conceding the moral indictment of his field, then turns that indictment into a technical problem. “It has often been made a matter of grave complaint” frames the critique as familiar, almost ritualized - not necessarily wrong, but not fatal either. The phrasing lets him acknowledge public suspicion of political economy while keeping the discipline’s dignity intact. He’s not begging forgiveness; he’s setting the terms under which the discipline can respond.

The charge he quotes - that economists “confine their attention to Wealth” and “disregard…Happiness or Virtue” - is less about spreadsheets than about the fear that industrial modernity is reorganizing society around money as the only legible value. In early 19th-century Britain, political economy wasn’t an abstract university pursuit; it was the intellectual engine behind arguments on poverty relief, wages, factory conditions, and the ethics of markets. Critics heard “wealth” and imagined a science built to rationalize misery, one that could describe suffering with the coolness of a balance sheet.

Senior’s intent, though, is to separate domains: wealth is measurable, virtue is contested, happiness is slippery. The subtext is a defense of method masquerading as modesty. By treating “happiness or virtue” as considerations economists allegedly “disregard,” he implies they may be important but are not the economist’s proper object - a move that protects the discipline from moral controversy while also narrowing what counts as valid knowledge.

It’s a foundational maneuver in the history of economics: not claiming that virtue doesn’t matter, but insisting that the science can only speak with authority when it limits what it tries to measure.