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

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.