CHAPTER TWO

Ethics, Politics,
and Science

IN THE PREFACE to the first edition of The Principles of Economics, Alfred Marshall wrote that economic laws were “statements of tendencies expressed in the indicative mood, and not ethical precepts in the imperative.” But, he went on, “ethical forces are among those of which the economist has to take account.”1 Marshall suggested that individuals, even “economic man,” acted in accordance with a variety of moral codes and strictures, to which the economist needed to pay attention.²

Eighteen years later, in 1908, speaking in front of an assembled crowd, A. C. Pigou proposed a deeper relationship between economics and ethics. In expounding on the purpose and value of economics, he would “trespass beyond the domain of economic science itself” by making “an estimate of values in the ethical sense, and, therewith, an entrance into the province of moral philosophy.”³ Economic science, he claimed, did not exist as an end in itself. Neither its practice nor the knowledge it yielded was inherently good. Economics shed light on humankind in the “ordinary business of life,” but it was “not in the ordinary business of life that mankind is most inspiring.”⁴

Economics was useful, Pigou explained, only because of its ability to “bear fruit”—to do real, practical, ethical work in improving the conditions of human well-being. The impulse to do such work, he noted, was “a commanding one,” for though great strides had been made in social reform, the “evil” that remained was still great. “The least imaginative among us sometimes sees with vividness the faces of the suffering and the degraded who have been worsted in the industrial struggle. The contrast between the luxury of some and the penury of others is evident.”5

These words were delivered not at a political rally, though they would have resonated with both Liberals and an increasingly powerful labor movement. They were, instead, delivered to a distinguished audience at the Senate House, the ceremonial hall at Cambridge. The speech, titled “Economic Science in Relation to Practice,” was Pigou’s inaugural address as Professor of Political Economy.

The circumstances of the address’s delivery underscored a major tension in Pigou’s early work. Pigou was invested with an ethical desire to help the masses, but he suffered from an unwillingness to get near them. The content of the speech, however, revealed not a tension but a synthesis of scientific, political, and moral elements. In the first decade of the twentieth century, these elements were to publicly weave in and out of one another, leaving Pigou’s politics, ethics, and economics not separate intellectual categories, but integrated components of a single mode of thought.

A Young Don’s Life

In 1902 at the age of twenty-five, Pigou was a fellow of King’s, a Cambridge lecturer in a burgeoning discipline, and the protégé of Britain’s most famous economist. Though relations had somewhat cooled with Browning, he would soon begin lecturing at the latter’s teachers’ college.⁶ But despite these responsibilities, Pigou was a don very much at ease, a man whose future stretched out languidly before him. He was a jovial fellow—and a jocular one. Recollections by his friends and students describe him as an animated bachelor who partook in lawn tennis and firework displays that went awry and left eyebrows “nothing to write home about.”⁷ He played tennis and golf as well as squash. On occasion, he would sneak into the gracious King’s College chapel with friends to hold races, the somber air broken by the resonant footfalls of young men on marble. With fellows and students alike, Pigou would take off for the Alps, just as Browning had done. These were jaunty excursions, largely consisting of climbing, but peppered with moments of luxury. Early trips saw Pigou bring along dinner jackets as well as mountain gear. On one such adventure, his tuxedoed party dined at the Schweitzerhof at Lucerne, a “first class occasion.” And for the remainder of the six-week holiday, the “wretched garments had to be posted on from place to place,” while the group “tramped with the more suitable kit . . . in rucksacks.”8

FIGURE 3. Photographic Portrait of A. C. Pigou taken in the J. Palmer Clarke
Studio. Courtesy of the Cambridgeshire Collection, Cambridge Central Library.

Pigou took more local mountaineering excursions with even greater frequency. He first visited the Lake District in 1901 with his friend Sclater from the Union to participate in “an institution called a Lake Hunt in which 20 or 30 Cambridge people . . . [took] part.” “It ought,” Pigou had anticipated in a letter to Browning, “be great fun.”9 The yearly “Man Hunt” had been started just three years before by G. M. Trevelyan and two friends and was modeled on an older game played at Harrow called “hare and hounds.”¹⁰ Bringing together a collection of thirty or forty young men, many of whom were progressive Liberals, the game took place over three days near Keswick, a town in the Lake District and the ancestral home of Pigou’s Harrow housemaster, Frank Marshall. Pigou was immediately drawn to the Cumbrian landscape, and he would return for the next fifty years, until infirmity made the 300-mile rail journey from Cambridge too arduous.

Back at Cambridge, there was a fluidity and ease about the young King’s fellows. In a lazily self-indulgent “account of day’s events” from 1906, the young King’s classicist John Tresidder Sheppard, wrote of breezing from strolls to philosophic conversations, and finally to Pigou’s rooms “to write.” There, he found “nobody + A.C.P[igou].”¹¹ Though he himself taught and wrote, Pigou always set aside a good deal of time for less serious pursuits. He hosted dinner parties whose invitations he composed elaborately in French. One guest was John Maynard Keynes, the son of John Neville Keynes and a King’s undergraduate whom Pigou befriended in 1904. Keynes was impressive even in youth. He managed, Pigou wrote, “to be clear-headed without making muddle-headed people hate him. That is a remarkable thing, which demonstrates that, besides the minor gift of cleverness, he has the major one of sympathy.”¹² The result was that Pigou extended himself to the younger man. “M. A.C. Pigou,” one dinner invitation read, “demande le plaisir de la compagnie de M. J.M. Keynes en vêtements magnifiques.”¹³

Magnificent clothes, extensive wine cellars, ritualized feasts: such were the staples of the life of a King’s fellow at the turn of the century. The college was an intellectual and social hothouse. A number of the fellows, including Pigou, lived within its walls, and a good many more ate their meals at the High Table set on a raised platform at the end of the college’s neo-Gothic dining hall. When Pigou joined the fellowship in 1902, it numbered about fifty, among them Browning, of course, but also two economic historians: J. H. Clapham and the “moustachioed and grave” W. F. Reddaway.¹⁴ The fellowship was bifurcated along the lines of age. A significant minority of scholars, Pigou included, were about to receive or had just recently received their MAs, a degree Cambridge awarded six years after undergraduate matriculation without any additional coursework or examination. Fellowship, however, was for life, and the majority of King’s fellows belonged to an older contingent whose presence helped preserve the timeless feel of the place. It was, in Pigou’s words, a “museum of the antique.”15 With somber words lightened by the flicker of a smirk, he quoted Dante’s Inferno to Donald Welldon Corrie, another King’s undergraduate with whom he became close, on returning to the college from a vacation.

As I came to the gates of the college, I saw written above it in letters of dull fire the words

Per me si va nella cita dolente; [Through me the way into the suffering city]

Per me si va tra la perduta gente. [Through me the way to everlasting pain]

. . . Come, they said, let us at least dine; and they did consume the goodly duck and did ask me, the latest comer to that dim abode to tell them of the world that lay beyond the fastened gates. And so the days pass in Malebolge.¹⁶

But though Pigou might now have lived in a somber “museum of the antique,” he was not one of the exhibits. Another Kingsman about Corrie’s age, Hugh Dalton, later Chancellor of the Exchequer, recalled Pigou as “tall and handsome like a Viking, a mountaineer, already a strong intellectual and moral force in the College.”¹⁷

Pigou was also now on his own, without strong family connections. His brother Gerard was far away, serving as a lieutenant in the navy and in 1904, his sister Kathleen married a first cousin, Arthur Hugh Oldham, also a naval officer, and shortly thereafter moved to Wales.¹⁸ Pigou’s mother died in 1902, and his father followed in 1905, leaving his entire estate, worth £8,184, to Pigou, the first son.¹⁹ His parents’ deaths brought new independence; their money ensured his ongoing solvency. But Pigou was discovering a different sort of freedom as well as he threw himself further into college life. Dalton remarked on Pigou’s habit of choosing “a series of young men as they passed through King’s to whom he gave unwavering sympathy and support. Good-looking, good on mountains, good moral tone. These were the gifts he most valued in them.”20 Pigou likely would not have identified himself as gay, either publicly or privately.²¹ Homosexuality was a crime in Britain, and though Pigou’s inclinations were a topic of gossipy discussion in the permissive atmosphere of King’s, it remains unclear whether he was ever romantically involved. That said, thoroughly immersed in the homosocial world of his Cambridge college, he expressed little interest in women, around whom he was legendarily shy. As colleague D. G. Champernowne wrote, Pigou “would speak gallantly of the lovely Mrs. Smith, the gorgeous Mrs. Brown and the beautiful Mrs. Jones: but the photographs around his room proclaimed that his eye for beauty was rather concerned with mountains and men.”²² Keynes, while a postgraduate at King’s in 1906, was less circumspect about Pigou’s purported homosexuality. Pigou was “very nice but a little depressed and lovelorn.” To Keynes, his interest in male undergraduates was “becoming a scandal.”²³

Early Political Involvement of the Marshallian Economist

Under the tutelage of Frank Marshall, Browning, and Alfred Marshall, all staunch Liberals, Pigou had long been immersed in a world of social reform. Indeed, his first academic publication evidenced the influence of a progressive strand of liberalism—the so-called new liberalism—on his early thinking. New liberalism emerged in the 1890s as part of an effort by Liberals to achieve gradualist socialist goals. As such, the movement generally took a softer line on the traditional Liberal priority of the individual over that of the social unit.²⁴ It also firmly stressed the priority of questions of ethics to those of scientific truth. But importantly, as Michael Freeden wrote in his classic study of the movement, economics was, for new liberals and positivists alike, “a scientific proving-ground of their ethical outlook, precisely because no contradiction was seen to exist between an economic science and humanism.”²⁵ This outlook was certainly shared by Pigou.

Indeed, in 1901, just after he retired from active participation in the Union Society but before election to King’s, Pigou contributed a chapter on private charity to a solidly new-liberal collection of essays dealing with urban poverty. The volume, titled The Heart of the Empire: Discussions of Problems of Modern City Life in England, was edited by a young and prominent new liberal, C.F.G. Masterman, with whom Pigou had become acquainted at the Union Society. Masterman, like Pigou, had been the Union’s president and had returned to the debating chamber throughout Pigou’s undergraduate years to speak against imperialism.26 But whereas Masterman spent his time after Cambridge primarily in the slums of southeast London, Pigou remained comfortably ensconced in his rooms in King’s. ²⁷ Pigou was well aware of this difference, and he began his contribution to Masterman’s book with the disclaimer that he was “unable to claim practical experience of life in the poorer parts of London.”²⁸ But though he was not fighting the battle on poverty from the trenches, his essay’s publication took a clear political stand for reform. He cited the existing “mass of misery and degradation” that comprised some 30 percent of London’s population as compelling reason to more systematically coordinate disparate charity efforts into an effective program of moral and material uplift.²⁹ Moreover, The Heart of the Empire was published while the Second Boer War continued to rage. In its implicit suggestion that Britain’s most pressing problems were social ills at home—at the “heart of the empire”—the book challenged the increasingly unpopular conflict, and by extension, the sitting government responsible for it. For many new liberals, the expenditures of an imperialist war in Africa ran diametrically counter to responsible social policy.³⁰

Pigou embraced many of the ethical and social commitments that characterized new liberals, with whom he rubbed shoulders at events like the Hunt in the Lake District, but it should be remembered that he often found himself at odds with some of the thinkers most closely associated with the term.³¹ Figures like J. A. Hobson and L. T. Hobhouse have been seen as intellectual opponents of the early Cambridge economists, who considered them less rigorous in their pursuit of social science.³² Though Cambridge economists felt the general pull toward more social forms of liberalism, Marshall—and Pigou—stayed closer to traditional utilitarian doctrines. As Freeden wrote, “two major aspects of utilitarianism were discarded by the new liberals: its ahistorical approach and its exaggerated faith in the power of the expert.”³³ Cambridge economists at the turn of the twentieth century might have challenged these tenets, but they hardly abandoned them. In fact, the scientific expert was to remain central in Pigou’s thinking for the better part of his intellectual life.

With fellowship and academic appointments in 1902, Pigou’s writings, both economic and political, took on a more theoretical slant, one that would highlight his Cambridge affiliation. As Marshall’s protégé, he was at the forefront of an intellectual movement that was rapidly gaining ground. The designation of “Marshallian” was an imprecise marker, but it was one that Pigou wholeheartedly embraced. Marshall had provided economics with a system, a comprehensive framework for approaching economic analysis. He presented a theory of how people operated “in the ordinary business of life,” generally applicable across historical time and space.34 And indeed, many of the most prominent features of this framework have persisted up to the present in economics curricula. The importance placed on rates of change in price, cost, and value; the notion of a “national income”; the importance of consumer surplus, which will be discussed later; and the now-ubiquitous supply and demand curves were key components of the Marshallian approach.

To be a Marshallian in the early 1900s, therefore, was to be someone who wielded these tools—these basic models of human behavior—in a manner that generally resembled Marshall’s own systematic use of them. No one did so as faithfully as Pigou. It was Marshall’s system of thought that Pigou taught in his lectures on foreign trade and on general economics that he billed as “not generally suitable for beginners.”³⁵ Similarly, it was Marshall’s system that he used in composing his articles for The Economic Journal, to which he contributed about two short articles per year starting in 1902. The very titles of Pigou’s pieces marked his association with Marshall’s theoretical approach, as opposed to the more statistically rooted historical school. He authored “A Point of Theory Connected with the Corn Tax” in 1902 and “Pure Theory and the Fiscal Controversy” two years later. Other articles of his from the period included “Some Remarks on Utility” and “Monopoly and Consumers’ Surplus,” both of which focused on elements central to Marshall’s foundations: the analysis and measurement of utility and surpluses.³⁶ Though these early contributions were not groundbreaking, they demonstrated Pigou’s easy facility in deploying Marshall’s methods.³⁷

As Pigou focused on economic theory for his academic responsibilities, he applied the same analytic approach to questions of politics. Despite his mentor’s efforts to differentiate economics from older methods of political economy, Pigou found himself musing on the “parallel” nature of political and economic theory. In June 1902, he wrote a short comment in The Economic Journal in which he argued that the basic economic ideas of supply and demand as well as the difference between the short term and the long term had clear analogues in political science. His purpose, he explained, was “to suggest, by means of an analogy, that the more elaborate [economic] discussions are not so far removed from the sphere of real life as the impatient reader is inclined to suppose.” In short, Pigou used politics as a means to explain foundational economic ideas. Focusing on the distinction between short- and long-run periods, he suggested that the same time horizons existed in the system of parliamentary democracy.

From a short period point of view the idiosyncrasies of particular ministers will generally be the dominant factors in determining legislation, just as in economics temporary manipulations of the market may, for the moment, entirely overbalance in importance the deeper causes governing normal values.

In the long run, however, the young idealist thought it “quite clear” that “the will of the Cabinet . . . is itself dependent upon the more slowly moving will of the people.”38

Pigou’s words demonstrated not only his engagement with the Marshallian analytical framework but also a fundamental tension in his relationship with the common man, a stress that was to linger in Pigou’s work for the next fifty years. On the one hand, he seemed to value the slow-moving equilibrium of popular sentiment—demonstrating an firm belief that it was the people, nebulously defined, who were the ultimate holders of political power. Their will, in a democracy, was the arbiter of legitimacy, and rightly so. Yet the note was intended, Pigou wrote, to educate the frustratingly slow “man in the street.” Good economic analysis, he plaintively held, could “find but a small public, whereas expositions which are easy and short and obvious—and wrong—are perused with avidity and consecrated as the oracles of Science.”³⁹ By using the simple metaphor of politics, he sought to lower his language to a common denominator, to avoid the “fine-drawn academic subtlety by which the practical man is so apt to be repelled.”40 Pigou, who so respected the ultimate will of the people, was himself repelled by the “practical men” who, in aggregate, composed its body.

The conflict between Pigou’s admiration for democracy and his contempt for everyday people “in the street” found striking expression in his continued and fervent participation in the debates over tariffs. Free trade was one of the dominant political issues of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Britain and a cause that would captivate the public and energize the Liberal Party.⁴¹ At its heart was a commitment to openness and transparency, coupled with a corresponding deep suspicion of protected special interests. In the British context, tariffs effectively meant subsidizing large landholders while damaging the competitiveness of the large swaths of Britain’s industrial north that produced goods for export. Moreover, it was argued that since protection drove up prices, it would also dig into the consumer’s pocketbook. Thus, for free traders, “protection” was just the protection of a particular group of individuals—those who supplied the home market—at the expense of everyone else.

In suggesting that tariffs would hurt “everyone else,” the free trade doctrine depended on a particularly Liberal understanding of how the individual related to the social, namely, through consumption. As a movement, free trade was built around a figure that Frank Trentmann has aptly called the “citizen-consumer.”⁴² To Liberal eyes, consumers did not constitute a special, but instead, a general interest group. For in a democratic market culture, such as the one that was evolving in cities and towns across Britain in the late nineteenth century, everyone consumed. Tariffs, the argument went, directly assaulted the consumer by raising the cost of everyday life. Pigou and other liberal economists heartily embraced the figure of the consumer as representative of the public interest—it is not for nothing that Marshall sought to maximize consumer surplus. But although the consumer was understood to be a nearly universal category, it was also clear that some consumers were hurt more than others by the higher prices that tariffs engendered. Because the poor were disproportionately impacted by duties, free trade positioned itself as inherently opposed to a regressive alternative.

Free trade had been an important issue in British politics during Pigou’s time at the Union, but it became the country’s central political flashpoint after the end of the Boer Wars in 1902.43 Whereas the tariff debates had started as largely economic and social arguments, over the course of 1902 and 1903, they became increasingly tied up with questions of empire. The shift stemmed largely from the efforts of Joseph Chamberlain, a self-made businessman from Birmingham who had risen through government ranks to become Colonial Secretary. One of the driving forces behind the lengthy war in South Africa, he emerged from the costly conflict with a heightened taste for empire and an appreciation of the loyalty of the former colonies—a loyalty that had been paid for by Canadians, Australians, New Zealanders, and many others, in blood. With the end of the war, Chamberlain began casting about for ways of keeping the Empire unified. Absent blood, he settled on money. In his vision, tariffs that protected imperial trade between Britain and her colonies and dominions—that is, a system of “Imperial Preference”—would bind the empire together.⁴⁴

Like other Marshallian economists and, indeed, many other Liberals, Pigou was unmoved by the new geopolitical rationale for protection. Still, he was reticent about engaging in public rhetoric. In 1902, as the debate heated up, Pigou penned a letter to the editors of The Speaker, a Liberal magazine, in response to an article about duties on grain. Though Pigou was strongly opposed to such tariffs, his principal contention was that economists should not directly enter into specific political discussions. It was not “the duty of our eminent professors to descend into the arena of politics and ‘give counsel’ to the Government through the public press.” The rationale was simple: if professors “had spoken upon this matter they would have weakened their authority, which at the present time it is especially important that they retain.”⁴⁵ Public perception of professorial objectivity was to be protected at all costs.

That Pigou would abstain early on from public debate because of his commitment to scientific detachment is particularly striking, given his continued belief in free trade. For, in truth, Pigou was chomping at the bit to argue against tariffs, as he had since 1898 at the Union Society. In 1902, he wrote popular articles for two liberal publications, the Pilot and The Westminster Gazette, in addition to a detached theoretical article on the subject.46 In all three submissions, Pigou took a very reserved tone and couched his points as theoretical rather than practical. In 1903, in an article for the Liberal Fortnightly Review, he did list the various “plainly ill-considered” logical errors of tariff reformers, dismissing arguments for Neomercantilism and noting that tariffs on basic goods would disproportionately hurt the poor.⁴⁷ Still, his Fortnightly Review article did not overtly advocate for free trade but presented itself as only correcting popular misconceptions. Like the letter to the editors of the Speaker, the piece sought to maintain economic arguments as the exclusive legitimate preserve of technically trained practitioners. “Economic science,” Pigou wrote, “is not a subject in which persons, however eminent, can expect, without special training, to negotiate an argument successfully.”⁴⁸ He self-righteously continued: “If the public can be brought to see that even . . . [distinguished men] find themselves ‘in wandering mazes lost’ when they set out on predatory excursions into the domain of economics, the conclusions of ‘the man in the street’ may perhaps assume a less wild and confident tone.”⁴⁹

As ill-conceived economic arguments began to appear in the popular press with greater frequency, Pigou found his tenuous abstention from public advocacy ever harder to maintain. He finally caved in the summer of 1903, when he joined thirteen other economists in writing an open letter to the Times to offer academic, though hearty, support of free trade.⁵⁰ The list of signatories included many of the most prominent economists in Britain. Marshall signed, as did F. Y. Edgeworth, J. S. Nicholson, and L. R. Phelps, the then editor of the Economic Review. It went without saying that Pigou would stand with his teacher Marshall, for tariff reform was a highly divisive issue, not just nationally, but also locally among Cambridge economists. With Marshall and Pigou supporting free trade and H. S. Foxwell and William Cunningham (returned from America) backing tariffs, the issue added a political dimension to the widening split between the remaining historical economists and the increasingly dominant Marshallians.⁵¹

After the very public summer manifesto of 1903, Pigou engaged more and more in popular debate. Over the summer, he wrote his first book, a very short one, on trade barriers. The Riddle of the Tariff, which was published in October, took a tone of analysis rather than argument, and Pigou claimed that he dwelt on economic aspects rather than political ones as he lacked “the practical knowledge needed for forming an adequate judgment.” But though Pigou pitched the book as a heuristic enterprise, it was a tract intended for “the general reader,” with political implications easily discernable beneath the veil of scientific inquiry.52 Over the next four months, Pigou wrote five letters to the editor of the Times, all with a clear free trade agenda, in which he sparred with other contributors and even directly challenged Foxwell.⁵³ Still, he did not advocate in popular terms but in distinctly academic language, and in general, remained significantly more restrained than many of his colleagues, who shed their detachment. Edwin Cannan, a Liberal economist at the London School of Economics (LSE), declared that the statements of pro-tariff politicians made his “blood boil.”⁵⁴

Nevertheless, there was no question that Pigou was taking a public political stand. At the end of 1903, he wrote a scathing condemnation of tariff reform, in which he analyzed the monetary costs associated with the system of Imperial Preference put forward by Chamberlain. He estimated that the program would cost the United Kingdom £500,000 from higher prices alone.⁵⁵ He further calculated that the transfer from “general consumer to agricultural landlord” would be well over £3 million.⁵⁶ At home in Cambridge, Pigou returned to the Union’s debating chamber alongside Trinity College philosopher J.M.E. McTaggart in October 1903 to unsuccessfully oppose “the reconsideration of our Fiscal Policy, as proposed by Mr Chamberlain.”⁵⁷ Later, in response to Cunningham’s decision to offer free public lectures in support of tariff reform, Pigou; McTaggart; and another fellow of King’s, H. O. Meredith, began a lecture series of their own.⁵⁸ By the following summer, in a review of a pro-tariff book in The Economic Journal, Pigou was making fewer pretentions to objectivity. After characterizing the book as “disappointing,” with a weak and inconsistent argument, he admitted that it was possible that “in forming this judgment, the reviewer may have been biased by his distaste for certain of the conclusions reached. If that is so, he can only ask pardon for a frailty that is not uncommon.”⁵⁹

In 1904, Pigou became the secretary of the newly formed Cambridge Free Trade Association, signing his name to the many announcements and invitations it circulated. The group’s president, Arthur Elliot, was the editor of the staunchly Liberal Edinburgh Review, to which Pigou would contribute anonymous articles in 1904 and 1906.60 As an entity organized to promote free trade candidates for Parliament, the Association faced an uphill battle. Until 1950, the University of Cambridge was a separate constituency supporting two members of parliament. Alumni, therefore, cast two ballots in elections: one in their home constituency and one for the University seats. The Cambridge Free Trade Association advocated in both the local and university elections, but since 1885, both the University’s two seats as well as the borough’s seat had been firmly in the landed Conservative camp and were to remain so throughout the first decade of the twentieth century. In spite of the relatively inclement political atmosphere, the group held meetings and hosted speakers in the Cambridge Guildhall—the politician George Goschen spoke in 1905, for instance—and by 1906, the Association boasted 280 members and 372 “sympathizers.”⁶¹

That year, political agitations reached a feverish pitch just before the general election, in which the Association unsuccessfully backed the popular Conservative incumbent John Eldon Gorst, who had broken with his party and was running as the “Free Trade” candidate in the university race. The election provoked Pigou’s most substantial academic effort in support of free trade: a new book titled Protective and Preferential Import Duties, published a few months before the vote that would decide the issue. By this point, he was so keen to get his ideas in print that he offered to publish at his own expense.⁶² Inside the book, however, Pigou retained his academic tone and wrote in cautious language wrapped in economic theory that was more or less inaccessible to the lay reader. When he proposed the book to his publisher, Macmillan, he noted that it was “designed to be, not polemical, but scientific, and it does not deal except incidentally with popular arguments.”⁶³ He reiterated these claims in the book’s introduction, stipulating that he dealt only with economic issues related to tariffs. Of the other issues, Pigou wrote, “the economist has no peculiar knowledge; his science can tell him nothing, either of what they will be or, when their nature is given, of the relative importance belonging to them and to the economic effects proper.”⁶⁴

In theory, the economist’s role was to be that of a technical consultant, one whose respected objectivity would translate into popular influence. Pigou recognized that though economics and politics were meaningfully related, they inhabited distinct spheres, and that of the two, the political was of greater immediate importance. Regardless of their merits, economic arguments for free trade would only be of use in so far as they affected political decisions. Indeed, Pigou recognized that his own economic justifications for keeping trade barriers open were not those “of first rate importance.” Instead, what really provided the decisive case against Tariff Reform was that “in England, the supreme financial authority is, not a bureaucracy, but a Ministry subject to the control of Parliament. In view of the many and great interests which a protective tariff might affect, it is too much to hope that those who controlled it would be left unhampered in the contemplation of their intellectual task.”65 There simmered, in Pigou’s words, a profound distrust for the machinations of democratic politics and popular administration. All of Pigou’s rigorously justified economic arguments were superseded, even in his own mind, by a frank recognition of the limitations of popular rule. With a touch of sardonic irony, he adopted the tone of the detached academic, quite unconcerned with popular [mis]conceptions, interested only in ensuring that those in charge of the national economy were devoted to “their intellectual task” and not unduly influenced by more worldly concerns.

Ultimately, for all his political agitation, Pigou cherished a conception of the economist as truth bearer. Whether the general public chose to accept economic truths was, though important, not to be the immediate concern of the economist. But, of course, in presenting economists as noble scientists, Pigou worked to cement their authority and thereby improve the likelihood that the truths they presented would be recognized as such. Thus, though Pigou certainly sought to argue against trade barriers, he was quick to couch his assertions in academic qualifications. As he held in the 1902 letter to The Speaker, the legitimacy that the economist’s opinion could carry was dependent on a perception of objective detachment. To make his economic argument convincing to a general audience, Pigou would need to set boundaries for his political engagement. More generally, as someone close to Marshall and thereby invested in the project of legitimizing a new breed of professional economists, Pigou did not want to make himself—or his Marshallian colleagues—appear merely partisan.

Formulation of Pigou’s Ethics

Pigou’s fears of tariff reform—and with them his public advocacy against the program–evaporated as voters delivered the Liberals, with their free trade agenda, to power in a landslide victory. In September 1906, after the election, Pigou penned another reflection on the connection between political and economic theory. His view had certainly evolved. Whereas the 1902 article had suggested a “parallel,” the 1906 piece, published in The Economic Journal, claimed a “unity” to which the two fields both belonged. In its suggestion that the free working of a democratic system was a manifestation of a natural order, much like the forces of supply and demand, Pigou’s piece was smug. Though “lagging” could occur in the short term, in the long run, supply and demand would perfectly equilibrate. So, too, Pigou wrote, when a piece of legislation was demanded, those “existing firms and ministers in power occupy a position of independence over against demanders. . . . In fact, the governing body is, as a rule, a unity, and its analogue is the industrial combine exercising the privileges of a temporary monopoly.” Like a firm, the government in power might try to advertise, to generate demand for policy where there was none before. “Chamberlain’s repudiation of Free Trade” was a “prominent illustration” of this effect.66 In the end, however, the lag was resolved when the full weight of the demand for free trade was brought to bear on the current government. With that, the Conservatives lost control of the country for the first time in two decades, and national politics was restored to its natural equilibrium. The “people,” after all, were not seen to be so incompetent when they voted for the right policies.

Pigou’s article, “The Unity of Political and Economic Science,” expressed a triumphal conception of legislative history advancing in an inexorable march toward progress. In it, Pigou ostensibly offered a positive theory about the way politics and economics functioned: although local phenomena might temporarily impede the general trends predicted by the laws of social science, in the long term, the laws held fast. But Pigou was making more than a value-neutral observation. He was thrilled that the Liberals had prevailed in the election, and it was obvious that article was precipitated by the pleasing victory at the polls.

In this light, Pigou’s subject matter—the unity of political and economic science—is especially important. Pigou reacted to a political event by writing on political theory, which despite all claims to the contrary, was laden with extra-scientific emotion. And just as he had claimed in his article, Pigou’s political and economic science functioned in similar ways. His economic analysis was no less motivated by normative commitments than was his analysis of politics. Indeed, throughout his life, Pigou never fully divorced his economic theory from his feelings on economic practice and economic consequences in society. The result was that his economics was always shot through with his ethical commitments. For Pigou, positive science and ethical theory were most useful when paired together. Ethics justified science and, in turn, science translated ethics into practice.

Pigou’s first full-length book, The Principles and Methods of Industrial Peace (1905), demonstrated the extent to which his ethics and economics intertwined.67 Emerging from a series of eight lectures Pigou delivered at University College, London, beginning in April that year, the book offered a rigorous analysis of the bargaining positions of industrial firms and trade unions.⁶⁸ It was, in the first instance, a mature expression of Marshallian thought applied to a typically reformist liberal problem: the determination of the most economically efficient and socially desirable ways to resolve labor disputes. Written by a man who earned his keep by teaching advanced courses on economic theory and foreign trade, the text was backed up with three appendices stocked with graphs and equations—careful analyses of wage fluctuations and bargaining diagrams, on which Pigou had collaborated with his friend J. M. Keynes.⁶⁹

In the preface, Pigou profusely thanked Marshall “for the suggestion of this subject, . . . for detailed criticism, for encouragement, and for general guidance.”⁷⁰ It was, Pigou wrote, his “privilege” to be Marshall’s pupil. But though, as Pigou informed his publisher, the book’s methodology was that of Marshallian “concrete economic analysis,” its inquiry was “an ethical one,” born from a reformist impulse. Its animating purpose was to serve as a “mild palliative of human ills.”71 In it, Pigou argued that in addition to the direct economic benefits—to workers, to employers, and to the general consuming public—industrial peace cultivated improved “moral,” and “sympathetic” connection between management and labor.⁷² Peace was to be affected, in principle, through an agreement to adjust wages according to an objective standard determined by economic science, one that took into account changes in labor supply and in consumer demand.⁷³ In practice, industrial peace was to be maintained by independent, impartial arbitrators, who ought possess both “practical knowledge” of the industry and “general economic knowledge,” of the kind presented in Pigou’s book.⁷⁴ As an ultimate backstop, Pigou argued that the state ought have the power to compel arbitration, at least with regard to important industries “whose interruption seriously injures the public.” In advocating such a state-centered policy, both “safeguarded . . . against grave disasters” and open “to the future development of a gradual advance towards a better condition of life,” he took the familiar line of a reformist Liberal.⁷⁵

After Industrial Peace, Pigou continued to act the part of the Marshallian economist. In 1906, he took over teaching Marshall’s advanced theoretical course at Cambridge on “Analytical Difficulties,” and in the following year he began teaching as a lecturer at King’s as well.⁷⁶ He wrote frequently and passionately as an economic commentator, ever attentive to maintaining and managing the public perception of the economic profession. Yet his interest in ethical issues also remained strong.

In 1907, Pigou was consulted as an academic expert by the Royal Commission on the Poor Laws, for which he composed a technical memorandum on the measurable economic costs associated with relief programs, both in terms of the size and distribution of national wealth.⁷⁷ Pigou argued that in the first instance, the poor laws “react upon the value of people as ethical personalities,” and he expressed concern about relief curtailing industrious “economic virtues.”⁷⁸ Though his memorandum, which he wrote in 1907 while traveling with Corrie, was less overt in its normative commitments than was his 1901 chapter on private charity on which it was based, his Liberal values were clearly on display. These values were in step with those of the Commission’s subsequent Minority Report, compiled largely by the Fabian socialist Beatrice Webb and researched partly by a young William Beveridge, a rising Liberal reformer and future architect of Britain’s National Health Service.79 Like Webb and Beveridge, Pigou endorsed both a system of aid to the poor that was differentiated according to the recipient’s opportunity to be employed and a national compulsory insurance scheme.

By 1908, he had also published several essays on issues in moral philosophy and was engaged in exploring the ethical questions that were anterior to economic considerations. In fact, nearly half of Pigou’s publications before 1908 concerned topics that were not, strictly speaking, those of economic theory. Much of this was due to the general influence of reformist liberalism—the first decade of the twentieth century was a time of great ferment and success for Liberals and socialists interested in reforming a host of issues, including the Poor Laws, workmen’s insurance, the burden of taxation, and the power of the aristocracy.⁸⁰ Yet a good part of the reason for Pigou’s attention to ethics was also due to the changing landscape of Cambridge philosophy.

To a significant degree, Pigou’s ethical writings responded to the 1903 publication of G. E. Moore’s Principia Ethica.⁸¹ One of the founders of analytic philosophy, Moore had suffered an early loss of Christian faith and brought a profound skepticism to his treatment of utilitarian as well as idealist ethics. Moore accepted the assertion of Henry Sidgwick that the good was to be known intuitively, but rejected Sidgwick’s common-sense morality as well as his conventional utilitarian belief that pleasure was the sole good. For Moore and his followers, the most worthy states of mind had to do with human interaction, beauty, love, and truth.⁸² Moore’s ethics, as formulated in Principia Ethica, took Cambridge by storm. Historian Robert Skidelsky described their reception among the Cambridge Apostles, the intellectual secret society whose membership included philosopher Bertrand Russell, mathematician G. H. Hardy, and many future members of the Bloomsbury group, including J. M. Keynes: “The Apostles were looking for an ethic which could direct attention to ends other than the duties set before the Victorian gentleman. This Moore provided for them. He unshackled contemporary ethics from its connection with social utility and conventional morality by locating its ultimate ends in goods which stood apart from the Victorian scheme of life.”83 Moore’s moral system significantly changed what it meant to live rightly.⁸⁴ It seemed to liberate morality from strict conventions and open it to more sentimental pursuits like love and aesthetics. This changing sentiment was echoed in Pigou’s own work. In an essay published in 1908, “The Ethics of Nietzsche,” Pigou wrote, “what we [in ethical inquiry] want to discover is the nature of the good life.”⁸⁵

Pigou was not an Apostle, but as a young don himself in search of the “good life,” he was not immune to Moore’s allure. In his auto-biography, Labour Party politician Hugh Dalton recalled the general excitement around the publication of Principia at Cambridge, noting that Pigou himself, like many others, had “accepted” Moore.⁸⁶ Certainly, Pigou read Moore and would have shared many acquaintances with the Trinity College philosopher just five years his senior. And he undoubtedly recognized the immensity of Moore’s contribution to modern ethics. In a 1913 letter to Keynes concerning the formulation of his own ethical statements, Pigou inquired whether Moore had already addressed all of his ideas.⁸⁷

Between 1905 and 1908, when he succeeded Marshall to the Chair of Political Economy, Pigou wrote and published several reflective articles that dealt principally with questions of ethics and of the “ultimate good.” In their context, they largely staked out his opposition to the Oxford-based school of British idealism and its chief proponents, including T. H. Green and F. H. Bradley, which, given his Cambridge utilitarian training, was hardly surprising. The idealists were anti-empiricists, favoring a belief in an absolute reality to be accessed by the faculty of reason alone, an idea the self-consciously scientific Pigou would not countenance.⁸⁸ Yet in his challenges, Pigou also distanced himself from purely utilitarian lines of argument.

A glimmer of Pigou’s discomfort with certain utilitarian categories appeared in Industrial Peace, in which he suggested that the causes of social realities were, “as Bentham held, in mental facts, though not of course, as he also held, in mere pleasure and pain.”89 It was not just, however, that Pigou rejected a hedonic sort of utilitarianism. In his 1907 essay, “The Problem of Good,” he characterized Sidgwick and “the Utilitarians” as believing “that the only element upon which the goodness of a conscious state depends is the quantity of pleasant feeling that it contains.”⁹⁰ Like Sidgwick in The Method of Ethics, Pigou proceeded to outline several other competing doctrines of the good. But unlike Sidgwick, Pigou did not conclude that the utilitarian position was the only logically correct one. Instead, he observed, “the only conclusion reached is that the goodness of any conscious state is, to use a mathematical phrase, a function of several variables.”⁹¹ He even shied away from the proposition that “the goodness of a total state is increased by an increase in the quantity of pleasant feeling contained in it.” “States of deliberate evil-doing are conceivable,” he noted, “which would be made worse and not better if they became happier.”⁹² Bringing an economic toolkit to the study of ethics, he elaborated on the nature of his “good function:”

It may be held that pleasure is essential to a good state in the sense that any predominance, however slight, of pain over pleasure must always render the state as a whole bad. In my phrasing this would read that, whenever the sign of the variable pleasure is negative, that of the function is negative also. I do not accept this view, nor do I believe that it is in accordance with the ethical judgments of “plain men.”⁹³

Precise and analytical, Pigou argued that pleasure was not the ultimate determinant of the “good” and furthermore, that common sense morality—the ethical judgments of “plain men”—tended to support his claim. This was a clear signal of divergence from Sidgwick, from whom the term “plain men” came, and who relied on common sense morality to arbitrate utilitarian ethics.⁹⁴

In “The Problem of Good” and in other works from the same time, Pigou seemed to adopt parts of Moore’s ethics, emphasizing aesthetic ideals like love and beauty as important variables in the ultimate “good” function. Though he explicitly declared his disbelief that increasing the pleasure of a state would also always increase its overall goodness, Pigou was less skeptical about the variable of “good will.” Indeed, the presence or absence of “good will” was, as an indicator of the goodness of a state, “much more plausible” than the presence or absence of pleasure.95 Love, too, was an important variable in the “good function.”⁹⁶ In short, Pigou—Keynes’s “lovelorn” bachelor—treated ideals like love and good will with the same if not greater weight as that with which he treated pleasure or utility. In a different essay from the same period, he held up the gospels as a source of ethical meaning, noting approvingly that for Jesus, “goodness was to be and not to do something.”⁹⁷ Pigou asserted: “His . . . teaching does not . . . suggest that righteousness can be based on selfish motives.”⁹⁸ Rather, it was love—both of the divine and of one’s neighbor—that lay at the very heart of the Christian conception of the good as laid out in the gospels. It was “love” that made the Christian doctrine worth remembering and Jesus a “conception, a life, a character, which the world might reverence more wisely, but can never love too well.”⁹⁹

Sidgwick had grown up as a practicing Anglican and although he rejected the orthodox strictures of religious belief, he was reticent to abandon religion, even if his ethics did not hinge on the existence of God. As Keynes once put it, Sidgwick “never did anything but wonder whether Christianity was true and prove that it wasn’t and hope that it was.”¹⁰⁰ For his part, though several of his friends ultimately took the cloth, Pigou was not a religious man. Still, in his early writings on religion and theism, he was interested in incorporating Christian values into a modern ethical framework.¹⁰¹ Moore’s emphasis on aesthetic ideals like love and beauty, though meant to serve as a separable alternative to religion, provided just such a structure. Christian righteousness, for example, could be conceived as leading not to physical pleasure, but instead to a higher state of goodness, through increased beauty, love, and good will.

But there was also a darker side to Pigou’s Moorean-inflected multivariable “good function.” In his discussions of the “quality of the people,” and his treatment of eugenics, Pigou demonstrated a concern with an aesthetic calibrated to a scale of Darwinian biological fitness. Starting with a short article in 1907 and continuing throughout his works on welfare economics, Pigou rigorously engaged with eugenic arguments, a step Marshall had never taken.¹⁰² Biological considerations, to Pigou’s mind, overlapped considerably with economic ones. Like economics, eugenics was ultimately a tool to serve a particular moral end. This meant that biological facts—insofar as they were useful in the improvement of society—were themselves contingent on a question that was “wholly ethical”: of “what kind of society is good.”103

Pigou’s answer to that question looked considerably different from that of more extreme social Darwinists like R. H. Lock and R. C. Punnett, both a two-minute walk away at Gonville and Caius College, who argued that human progress was entirely contingent on gametes.¹⁰⁴ In his 1907 article, Pigou issued a strong corrective to eugenic arguments: “The entity which biology declares to be unaffected by ancestral environment is a different entity from that to which the conception of progress applies.”¹⁰⁵ Human “quality” could be improved through education and moral structures, which spanned generational lines. “The environment of one generation can produce a lasting result,” he would later write, “because it can affect the environment of future generations. Environments, in short, as well as people, have children.”¹⁰⁶ Still, like many other economists of his day, Pigou thought that in “extreme cases” of “tainted persons”—“the imbeciles, the idiotic, the sufferers from syphilis and tuberculosis”—policies of sterilization could be justified on grounds of “social improvement.” Society was comprised of a highly heterogeneous—and stratified—populace, and Pigou was all for differentiating between the various strata.¹⁰⁷ He “tentatively” suggested that the “original properties of the poor as a whole are worse than those of the rich.”¹⁰⁸ Certainly, the poor were the “morally and socially lowest classes in the community,” and because they reproduced with greater rapidity than their social betters, steps might usefully be taken to limit their propagation.¹⁰⁹ But of course, eugenic considerations were only one element of Pigou’s complex ethical framework, affecting only select variables in his function of the good.

In the final analysis, the most salient feature of Pigou’s ethics was its imprecision. There was not one “good,” but many. And Pigou was more concerned with moving in the right direction than he was with defining the parameters of a rigorous “good function.” He made this intention explicit in Industrial Peace, in which he sought to offer a scientific solution to the problems of industrial strife between labor and management. Though he admitted that the project was an ethical one, he declared that it could “be conducted without reference to those fundamental controversies in which the science of the ‘good’ is involved.” A true solution would be palatable to ethical thinkers of all stripes. For, “if only a scheme were found by which rich and poor could be bound together in closer unity, all schools of thought would welcome that result.” Such an agreement would be “sufficient for our purpose, even though they immediately dispute as to whether it is good because it makes men happier, or because it is a step toward the moral union of the Kingdom of God.”110 This sort of pragmatic ethical pluralism would remain a hallmark of Pigou’s thinking and serve as a basis for his decision to principally work on problems whose status as moral ills was universally acknowledged.

The Right Man at Hand: Marshall’s Successor

For all his political agitations, Pigou had always argued that economics was to be a positive science, divorced from explicit political agendas. So if he had any reticence toward explicitly publicly discussing political issues before 1908, he was positively adamant to avoid such topics when he became a professor, which he did that year at the “preposterously” young age of thirty.¹¹¹ Pigou’s ascent to the Cambridge Chair of Political Economy was a major juncture in his life, one that at once significantly narrowed the scope of his publications but also set him on a course to become the most respected academic economist in Britain. The new position carried great weight. In 1908 Britain, professorships were rare in any field but especially so in economics, for which there were only a handful in the country. And Pigou’s chair held particular importance: it was Alfred Marshall’s old position, the seat from which Marshall had shaped the discipline of economics as practiced at Cambridge and in universities across Britain and the empire. Not only did Pigou take Marshall’s institutional place, he was Marshall’s student and chosen man for the job. In his inaugural lecture, Pigou asserted: “It will be my earnest endeavour to carry on and develop . . . the work that . . . [Marshall] has begun, and to pass forward to others what I have learned from him.”¹¹²

Despite its growing importance, the Marshallian line’s continuation had not been a foregone conclusion at Cambridge. The process of appointing, or “electing,” a new professor was left to a small committee, drawn from both inside and outside the university, and Pigou’s own election proved especially political and hard fought, with the electors splitting along both ideological and methodological lines. His chief competitor for the position was H. S. Foxwell, one of Marshall’s oldest friends and a lecturer at Cambridge since 1874.113 Foxwell, however, was a stalwart of the so-called historical school and thus predictably came into conflict with Marshall on matters of theory.¹¹⁴ There was also friction over national politics, as Foxwell was one of the few economists to have supported the cause of bimetallism (a system whereby currency was pegged to both gold and silver) in the late 1800s, as well as that of tariff reform in the early 1900s.¹¹⁵

Foxwell himself thought his public disagreement with Marshall over tariffs had cost him Marshall’s support for his bid for the professorship and certainly, it widened the rift between the two men.¹¹⁶ But a host of other factors affected the election’s outcome. Pigou, after all, had long been mentored by Marshall, and Foxwell had chafed at Marshall’s attachment to Pigou for just as long.¹¹⁷ As early as May 1901, J. N. Keynes had noted in his diary, “Marshall is putting on Pigou as a Lecturer in Political Economy and the relations between him & Foxwell are very strained.”¹¹⁸ Jealous and hurt, Foxwell, who was known for his temper, vented to Keynes that Pigou was the “least qualified to deal with a general class, as he is such a prig!”¹¹⁹ Matters were not helped by the fact that Pigou and Foxwell had decidedly different styles of economics; Pigou found the historical school outdated, and Foxwell objected to “smart fencing with abstract principles à la Pigou.”¹²⁰ In 1906, in an effort to push Foxwell and Cunningham out of teaching for the Economics Tripos once and for all, Marshall suggested that Foxwell focus more on history and let other, younger colleagues (read: Pigou) take over his economics course load. In the lead up to his own retirement and the mid-1908 meeting of the men who would decide his successor, Marshall campaigned heartily for his student, “incensing” one elector, J. S. Nichol-son, with his “maneuverings.”¹²¹ J. N. Keynes was also an elector, and to secure his support for Pigou, Marshall may have hinted at a conditional offer of a lectureship to his son, Maynard.¹²² The pressure mounted until it was sufficient for the older Keynes to confide to his diary, “I very much wish that I were not an elector.”123 In the end, Pigou won a narrow majority of the votes.¹²⁴ With that, the delighted Marshall sent Foxwell what the latter described as a “very fulsome letter,” in which Marshall freely admitted that “Pigou is . . . likely to be recognized ere long as a man of quite extraordinary genius: and I hoped that he would be elected to the Professorship.”¹²⁵

Ascending to Marshall’s chair had an immediate effect on Pigou’s self-fashioning. “Before I was elected professor, I used to do a certain amount of political speaking, chiefly in connection with Free Trade,” he wrote to fellow economist Roy Harrod much later in life. “But after election, I decided to cut out politics altogether.”¹²⁶ Ethics also receded from Pigou’s scope of publication. At the time of his appointment, the manuscript for Pigou’s collection of essays, The Problem of Theism and Other Essays, had been sent to print, but the book had not yet been released. Pigou, now a professor, found himself “in a position of some embarrassment as regards the publication of a book of philosophical essays immediately after my somewhat unexpected election to the Cambridge chair of political Economy.”¹²⁷ In a letter to his publisher, Pigou noted that he had revised the preface of the book, which now stressed that the essays were “the result, not of my main work, but of a by-occupation, and that they do not pretend to deal with the subjects discussed in them from the standpoint of a professional student.”¹²⁸ But editing the preface was evidently not enough. In light of his intervening election, he wrote, “I wish also to ask you, in any advertisement that you may publish, not to stress—if possible not to use—my title of Professor of Political Economy.”¹²⁹

Pigou’s explanation for this request was that he did not want “to give the impression that I have rushed into print . . . essays on a different subject directly after my election and am using the fact of the election to push the sale of the essays.”¹³⁰ Yet there was another rationale lurking behind the proffered one, related to honoring the value Alfred Marshall placed on the modern scientific tools of the newly formed economics profession. It was all well and good to claim in his inaugural lecture that ethics had an important place in economics, but to publish explicitly on moral philosophy was another matter entirely.

Pigou did not wish to tarnish his new title—Marshall’s title—with anything that would leave so much as a smudge. He needed to carry on his teacher’s commitment to the creation of a respected discipline of economics, not divorced but distinct from the moral sciences, from ethics, from anything that was not scientific. For the stakes of presenting such a scientific face to the general public were high. A bloody intramural battle had just been fought on this very issue. Writing to Foxwell, an avid book collector, Marshall had once noted: “Of course our ideals in economics are different. I have noticed that when a book or pamphlet pleased you greatly you describe it as ‘scholarly’ whereas I am never roused to great enthusiasm about anything wh(ich) does not seem to me thoroughly ‘scientific.’”131

Marshall had ensured Pigou’s election on the premise that his successor would be not merely a scholar but a scientist. Had Pigou continued to publish on politics and ethics, he would have failed to fully live up to Marshall’s expectations of him. Marshall did not suggest that the economist operated with—or needed to possess—a fully scientific objectivity; as his biographer Peter Groenewegen notes, his “views on the objectives of economics were never constrained by a positivist agenda of normative / positive economics.”¹³² He was, however, keen to steer his fledgling discipline away from accusations of merely providing post facto justifications for given policy agendas.

It was for the same reasons that Pigou refused to wade into political debates after 1908. Pigou already had ample evidence of the damage politics could wreak on credibility and professionalism. Free trade had, after all, been a major issue in his own election. And although after losing out to Pigou, Foxwell recognized him as “a brilliant man,” he lashed out at the former’s partisanship in a letter to a friend: “he is young . . . and has been an extreme agitator on a side not popular either here or among influential people in the country.”¹³³ It was in this context that, seeking to preserve his own legitimacy as well as that of his title, Pigou would limit himself to topics that could not be mistaken for anything except economics. He would become a pure economist of the chair.