When the state borrowed the household's word, and when the household lost it

1767: the family is still the definition

The first English book with "political economy" in its title is Sir James Steuart's Inquiry of 1767. Its opening definition is not about the state. "Oeconomy, in general, is the art of providing for all the wants of a family, with prudence and frugality."¹ Only then does he scale it up: "What oeconomy is in a family, political oeconomy is in a state."²

So as late as 1767 the household was not a metaphor for the subject. It was the subject, and the nation was the household made large. A reader of Steuart would have understood the new science as an extension of what a good steward already did.

1776: the family is gone

Nine years later Adam Smith opened Book IV of The Wealth of Nations with a different definition. Political economy, "considered as a branch of the science of a statesman or legislator", has two objects: to provide a plentiful revenue for the people, and to supply the state with revenue for its services.³ There is no family in the sentence. The subject now belongs to the statesman.

Smith did not argue against Steuart's definition. He simply wrote a better book, and his definition is the one that lasted. The household dropped out of the word not by decision but by neglect.

1879: the "troublesome double-worded name"

For a century the subject was called political economy. Then, in the preface to the second edition of his Theory of Political Economy in 1879, William Stanley Jevons made the case for a shorter name. He wanted "the single convenient term Economics" in place of "the old troublesome double-worded name of our Science".⁴

His reasons are worth reading. "Economics" is "perfectly analogous in form to Mathematics, Ethics, Æsthetics". It has "the authority of usage from the time of Aristotle". The French had called the subject la science économique nearly a century earlier. He rejected the rivals on offer: "Plutology, Chrematistics, Catallactics".⁴ And he was careful about credit. Henry Dunning Macleod was, "so far as I know, the re-introducer of the name in recent years", and it "appears to have been adopted also by Mr. Alfred Marshall at Cambridge".⁴

Then Jevons left the old name on his own title page, because it was "obviously undesirable to alter the title-page of the book".⁴

1890: both names in one sentence

Alfred Marshall's Principles of Economics appeared in 1890 and became the textbook of the English-speaking world. Its title is usually treated as the moment the name changed. Its first sentence tells a different story: "Political Economy or Economics is a study of mankind in the ordinary business of life."⁵ Marshall kept both names in that sentence through eight editions and thirty years.

So the popular account, that Marshall renamed the subject in 1890, is a compression. The word "economics" had been English since the 1580s, meaning household management. Jevons argued for it in 1879 and credited Macleod. Marshall was already using it. The 1890 title was the landmark, not the origin.

What the household lost

Notice what happened to the word's meaning as it climbed. In Greek, oikonomia was the household first and the city second. In Steuart, the family was the definition and the state the extension. In Smith, the state was the definition and the family absent. By Marshall, "economics" was "mankind in the ordinary business of life", which sounds inclusive and in practice meant markets, prices and nations.

The household had not stopped existing. It had stopped having a name in the science. Its budgets, its stores, its debts, its annual reckoning, all the subject matter of two thousand years of books, were now "domestic" matters, outside the field that carried the household's own word.

Why it matters

When a subject loses its name it loses its students, its books and its measurements. For a century after 1890 the economics of a single household was not a recognized field. What filled the gap was advice: manuals, columns, almanacs, later software. Advice is not the same as a field. A field measures things and argues about the measurements. The next chapter is about the people who tried to build one.