The Victorian Effort to Exclude the Amateur ‘Public Intellectual’ from Economics: The Case of Stephen Versus Ruskin

Abstract

Victorian scientists and academics sought to use their increasingly specialised knowledge to exclude both the presumed second-rate thinkers and the literary men of letters from the various emerging disciplinary domains. In the field of political economy in the 1860s and 1870s, this process of exclusion entailed assessing whether scholars demonstrated sufficient knowledge of specific economic techniques and theorems, and then exploiting the developing intellectual networks of the period to either suppress or promote reviews of their publications. The nature of this struggle between the expert and amateur is evident in Leslie Stephen’s critiques of the work of John Ruskin after the latter had strayed from the fields of aesthetics and culture to comment upon political economy in a series of narratives between 1860 and 1884. It is argued that this exchange illuminates an early half step in the professionalization of the economics discipline and illustrates the way that specialists began to displace men of letters in Victorian intellectual culture.