Site hosted by Angelfire.com: Build your free website today!

Nassau William Senior

Nassau William Senior was a professor of economics at Oxford University. Like John Stuart Mill, he wanted to restrict the scope of economic science to the study of the factual and the probable. According to Senior, "economists conclusions, whateve r be their generality and their truth, do not authorize him in adding a single syllable of advice." Mill, Cairnes, Bagehot, and Senior saw political economy as a positive science rather than a hypothetical,( positive) science. " By this he means that its premisses are not arbitrarily assumed."

According to John Maynard Keynes," Senior and J.S. Mill were the earliest English economists who definitely formulated principles of economic method. They were the first to draw the distinction between normative and positive economics.

Works by Nassau William Senior:

Click on the icon to return to the list of economists.


Click on Léon Walras to return to the Walrasiad.