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Nassau William Senior (September 26, 1790 - June
4, 1864), England|English economist, was born at
Compton, Berkshire, the eldest son of the Rev. JR
Senior, vicar of Durnford, Wiltshire.

He was educated at Eton College|Eton and Magdalen
College, Oxford; at the university he was a
private pupil of Richard Whately, afterwards
archbishop of Dublin, with whom he remained
connected by ties of lifelong friendship. He took
the degree of B.A. in 1811, was called to the bar
in 1819, and in 1836, during the chancellorship of
Lord Cottenham, was appointed a master in
chancery. On the foundation of the professorship
of political economy at Oxford in 1825 Senior was
elected to fill the chair, which he occupied till
1830, and again from 1847 to 1852. In 1830 he was
requested by Lord Melbourne to inquire into the
state of combinations and strikes, to report on
the state of the law and to suggest improvements
in it.

He was a member of the Poor Law Inquiry Commission
of 1832, and of the Handloom Weavers Commission of
1837; the report of the latter, published in 1841,
was drawn up by him, and he embodied in it the
substance of the report he had prepared some years
before on combinations and strikes. He was also
one of the commissioners appointed in 1864 to
inquire into popular education in England. In the
later years of his life, during his visits to
foreign countries, he studied with much care the
political and social phenomena they exhibited.
Several volumes of his journals have been
published, which contain much interesting matter
on these topics, though the author probably rated
too highly the value of this sort of social study.
Senior was for many years a frequent contributor
to the Edinburgh Quarterly, London and North
British Reviews, dealing in their pages with
literary as well as with economic and political
subjects. He died at Kensington on the 4th of June
1864.

His writings on economic theory consisted of an
article in the Encyclopaedia Metropolitana,
afterwards separately published as An Outline of
the Science of Political Economy (1836), and his
lectures delivered at Oxford. Of the latter the
following were printed:
*An Introductory Lecture (1827)
*Two Lectures on Population, with a correspondence
between the author and Thomas Malthus|Malthus
(1831)
*Three Lectures on the Transmission of the
Precious Jktetals from Country to Country, and the
Mercantile Theory of Wealth (1828)
*Three Lectures on the Cost of obtaining Money and
on some Effects of Private and Government Paper
Money (1830)
*Three Lectures on Wages and on the Effects of
Absenteeism, Machinery and War, with a Preface on
the Causes and Remedies of the Present
Disturbances (1830, 2nd ed. 1831)
*A Lecture on the Production of Wealth (1847)
*Four Introductory Lectures on Political Economy
(1852).
Several of his lectures were translated into
French by M. Arrivabne under the title of
Principes Fondamentaux d'Economie Politique
(1835).

Senior also wrote on administrative and social
questions:
*A Letter to Lord Howick on a Legal Provision for
the Irish Poor, Commutation of Tithes and a
Provision for the Irish Roman Catholic Clergy
(1831, 3rd ed., 1832, with a preface containing
suggestions as to the measures to be adopted in
the present emergency)
*Statement of the Provision for the Poor and of
the Condition of the Laboring Classes in a
considerable portion of America and Europe, being
the Preface to the Foreign Communications in the
Appendix to the Poor Law Report (1835)
*On National Property, and on the Prospects of the
Present Administration and of their Successors
(anon.; 1835)
*Letters on the Factory Act, as it affects the
Cotton Manufacture (1837)
*Suggestions on Popular Education (1861)
*American Slavery (in part a reprint from the
Edinburgh Review, 1862)
*An Address on Education delivered to the Social
Science Association (1863)
His contributions to the reviews were collected in
volumes entitled Essays on Fiction (1864);
Biographical Sketches (1865, chiefly of noted
lawyers); and Historical and Philosophical Essays
(1865).

In 1859 appeared his Journal kept in Turkey and
Greece in the Autumn of 1857 and the Beginning of
1858; and the following were edited after his
death by his daughter:
*Journals, Conversations and Essays relating to
Ireland (1868)
*Journals kept in France and Italy from 1848 to
1852, with a Sketch of the Revolution of 1848
(1871)
*Conversations with Louis Adolphe Thiers|Thiers,
François Pierre Guillaume Guizot|Guizot and other
Distinguished Persons during the Second Empire
(1878)
*Conversations with Distinguished Persons during
the Second Empire, from 1860 to 1863 (1880)
*Conversations and Journals in Egypt and Malta
(1882)
*also in 1872 Correspondence and Conversations
with Alexis de Tocqueville from 1834 to 1859.

Senior's literary criticisms do not seem to have
ever won the favor of the public; they are,
indeed, somewhat formal and academic in spirit.
The author, while he had both good sense and right
feeling, appears to have wanted the deeper
insight: the geniality and the catholic tastes
which are necessary to make a critic of a high
order, especially in the field he chose that,
namely, of imaginative literature. His tracts on
practical politics, though the theses they
supported were sometimes questionable, were ably
written and are still worth reading, but cannot be
said to be of much permanent interest. But his
name continues to hold an honorable, though
secondary, place in the history of political
economy.

Senior regards political economy as a purely
deductive science, all the truths of which are
inferences from four elementary propositions. It
is, in his opinion, wrongly supposed by John
Stuart Mill|JS Mill and others to on a hypothetic
science founded, that is to say, on postulates not
corresponding with social realities. The premises
from which it sets out are, according to him, not
assumptions but facts. It concerns itself,
however, with wealth only, and can therefore give
no practical counsel as to political action: it
can only suggest considerations which the
politician should keep in view as elements in the
study of the questions with which he has to deal.
The conception of economics as altogether
deductive is certainly erroneous, and puts the
science from the outset on a false path. But
deduction has a real, though limited, sphere
within it. Hence, though the chief difficulties of
the subject are not of a logical kind, yet
accurate nomenclature, strict definition and
rigorous reasoning are of great importance. To
these Senior gave special attention, and,
notwithstanding occasional pedantries, with very
useful results.

In several instances he improved the forms in
which accepted doctrines were habitually stated.
He also did excellent service by pointing out the
arbitrary novelties--and frequent inconsistencies
of terminology which deface David
Ricardo|Ricardo's principal works, for example,
his use of value in the sense of cost of
production, and of high and low wages in the sense
of a certain proportion of the product as
distinguished from an absolute amount, and his
peculiar employment of the epithets fixed and
circulating as applied to capital. He shows, too,
that in numerous instances the premises assumed by
Ricardo are false. Thus he cites the assertions
that rent depends on the difference of fertility
of the different portions of land in cultivation;
that the laborer always receives precisely the
necessaries, or what custom leads him to consider
the necessaries, of life; that, as wealth and
population advance, agricultural labor becomes
less and less proportionately productive; and that
therefore the share of the produce taken by the
landlord and the laborer must constantly increase,
whilst that taken by the capitalist must
constantly diminish; and he denies the truth of
all these propositions.

Besides adopting some terms, such as that of
natural agents, from Jean-Baptiste Say|Say, Senior
introduced the word abstinence which, though
obviously not free from objection, is for some
purposes useful to express the conduct of the
capitalist which is remunerated by interest; but
in defining cost of production as the sum of labor
and abstinence necessary to production he does not
seem to see that an amount of labor and an amount
of abstinence are disparate, and do not admit of
reduction to a common quantitative standard. He
added some important considerations to what had
been said by Adam Smith on the division of labor.
He distinguishes usefully between the rate of
wages and the price of labor. But in seeking to
determine the law of wages he falls into the error
of assuming a determinate wage-fund, and states as
an economic truth what is only an identical
proposition in arithmetic.

Whilst entertaining such an exaggerated estimate
of the services of Malthus that he extravagantly
pronounces him as a benefactor of mankind on a
level with Adam Smith, he yet shows that he
modified his opinions on population considerably
in the course of his career, regards his
statements of the doctrine with which his name is
associated as vague and ambiguous, and asserts
that, in the absence of disturbing causes,
subsistence may be expected to increase in a
greater ratio than population. It is urged by HXC
Penn, and must, we think, be admitted, that by his
isolation of economics from morals, and his
assumption of the desire of wealth as the sole
motive-force in the economic domain, Senior, in
common with most of the other followers of Smith,
tended to set up egoism as the legitimate ruler
and guide of practical life. It is no sufficient
answer to this charge that he makes formal reserve
in favor of higher ends. From the scientific side
Thomas Edward Cliffe Leslie|Cliffe Leslie has
abundantly proved the unsubstantial nature of the
abstraction implied in the phrase desire of
wealth, and the inadequacy of such a principle for
the explanation of economic phenomena.

==Reference==
*This entry incorporates public domain text
originally from the 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica.