Background
Thomas Edward Cliffe Leslie was born on June 21, 1825 in County Wexford, Ireland.
(Land systems and industrial economy of Ireland, England, ...)
Land systems and industrial economy of Ireland, England, and continental countries. 424 Pages.
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Thomas Edward Cliffe Leslie was born on June 21, 1825 in County Wexford, Ireland.
Thomas Edward Cliffe Leslie received his elementary education from his father.
He studied Latin, Greek and Hebrew, at an unusually early age.
Then he was sent to King William's College, in the Isle of Man, where he remained until, in 1842, being then only fifteen years of age, he entered Trinity College, Dublin.
He studied at Lincoln's Inn and was for two years a pupil in a conveyancer's chambers in London.
Leslie started a career as a lawyer, joining the Irish bar in 1850. After further studies at Lincoln's Inn in London, Leslie was called to the English bar in 1857. However, he always took better to academia than the law office, and in 1853 was appointed Professor of Jurisprudence and Political Economy at Queen's University Belfast, a post he would hold until his death.
Cliffe Leslie nurtured from the start an interest in economics - especially applied economics. He was an active member of Dublin Statistical Society, giving Barrington lectures on political economy to the general public in Irish towns in 1852-53. Nonetheless, London remained his primary residence, and Cliffe-Leslie contributed steadily to primarily English magazines and reviews.
Cliffe Leslie demonstrated a historicist bent, derived partly from his own applied work, and partly indirectly from the continental German school (although Auguste Comte was probably a more significant influence). Cliffe Leslie particularly credits lectures given in the 1850s by the English legal sociologist Henry Maine for influencing him, and inducing him to discard abstract natural law theories and seeing the law as an outcome of its historical context. Leslie laid down his historicist gauntlet in his review of Adam Smith for the Fortnightly Review in 1870. He lauds Smith for being a proper inductive economist, constructing his economic theory from a thorough familiarity with the history and facts, and derides David Ricardo and the later Classical school for abandoning that track and replacing facts with abstractions, induction with deduction, real behavior with psychological ideals, etc.
Cliffe Leslie's dissatisfaction with Classical economics was already evident in his early economics-related work - most notably on land systems. The Irish Great Famine showed the failure of Classical theory to help understanding the real world, that trying to fit the Irish situation into a pre-existing theoretical model, only yielded wrong conclusions and poor solutions. Rather than demand the extension of English capitalist agriculture, Cliffe Leslie recommended land reform towards small proprietors as the solution to Ireland's problems. (Politically, Cliffe Leslie was an opponent of Home Rule). Cliffe Leslie applied his empirical approach to various other economic questions. He wrote extensively on the statistical relationship between the supply of gold and the price level in the 1870s. In an earlier essay (1863), Leslie expounded an anti-Malthusian demographic transition.
(Land systems and industrial economy of Ireland, England, ...)
(Format Paperback Subject History)