The Success of Mill's <i>Principles</i>

John Stuart Mill’s Principles of Political Economy was published on 25 April 1848. It was written with a high moralistic tone and sustained\nethical earnestness hitherto absent from economic discussion. But it was\nat the same time a major economic treatise, and in its overall conception\nand execution it challenged the Wealth of Nations in a way no other\nEnglish treatise had done, and no other would, until Marshall’s Principles\n(1 890). It was not merely the longest work in political economy\nsince the Wealth of Nations; Mill actually set out to emulate and to\nsupplant Smith’s classic. His own work, he explained in the Preface,\nwas an attempt “to combine [Smith’s] practical mode of treating his\nsubject with the increased knowledge since acquired of its theory [and]\nto exhibit the economical phenomena of society in the relation in which\nthey stand to the best social ideas of the present.,.t@e,,G,ahse did, with\nsuch admirable success, in reference to the philosophy of his century.”l\nThe Principles was rapidly successful; and so completely so that, as\nFoxwell later noted, “English economists, for a whole generation, were men of one book.”2