Full text: Economic essays

284 ECONOMIC ESSAYS IN HONOR OF JOHN BATES CLARK 
of Vienna. In the meantime von Bielfeld had introduced the 
term Political Economy in his Lehrbegriff der Staatskunst, 1761 
—a translation of his work published in French in the preceding 
year under the title of Institutions Politiques. 
In the interval we find progress in Italy. In 1754 the Uni- 
versity of Naples inaugurated, through the generosity of 
Bartholomeo Intieri, a chair of mechanics and commerce for 
Genovesi, who called the science economia civile. In 1768 the 
Austrian government founded a chair of Public Economy at 
Milan for Marquis Beccaria; and it was not long before chairs 
of a like nature were instituted in other Italian universities 
like Palermo and Modena. Verri introduced the new term in his 
Meditations on Political Economy, in 1771; but three years later 
Ortes attempted a new nomenclature in his work on National 
Economy. 
In Great Britain and France the development came somewhat 
later, although the subject of Police was included in 1727 in the 
instruction offered by Jershon Carmichael, who filled the chair of 
Moral Philosophy at Glasgow. Francis Hutcheson, who suc- 
ceeded to the chair in 1730, treated the subject more fully and 
first attracted the attention of Adam Smith. In 1746 Hutcheson 
was succeeded by Thomas Craigie. In 1752 Adam Smith, who 
had been appointed to the chair of Logic in 1751, was trans- 
ferred to that of Moral Philosophy. It was as the occupant 
of this chair that Adam Smith delivered in the early sixties his 
well known Lectures on Justice, Police, Revenue and Arms. 
After Adam Smith’s departure from Glasgow no further 
interest seems to have been taken in the subject until the begin- 
ning of the nineteenth century, when Dugald Stewart decided to 
give a course of lectures at the University of Edinburgh on what 
he now called Political Economy. 
William Pryme, who, as we shall see below, inaugurated 
lectures on the subject somewhat later at Cambridge, states that 
hitherto no lectures had been given on Political Economy in any 
university of the United Kingdom, but that Dugald Stewart, 
Professor of Moral Philosophy, had, in 1806, added to his own 
lectures for two or three years a “supernumerary supplemental 
course in that study.” * 
' Cf. Autobiographical Recollections of George Pryme, 1870, p. 120.
	        
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