A Look Back at Research from 1875

Summary

This series looks at research from years past. I survey a handful of books and articles in a particular year from math, economics, philosophy, international relations, and other interesting topics. This project was inspired by my retrospective on Foreign Affairs' first issue from September 1922. The Fortnightly Review was a prominent British periodical in the 1870s, edited by John Morley, publishing articles on a wide range of topics including literature, philosophy, politics, and economics. A quick perusal of the selections below illustrates that the Fortnightly had an excellent year in 1875. Once I started digging in, I found more interesting articles than I had time to read, particularly in the first six issues (January to June). Not only do the topics heavily overlap with those covered in this project, but the articles are generally well-written and often thread the line between academic rigor and popular style. To a modern reader, this means that they are complex enough to have something interesting to say but accessible enough to figure out the context. Claude Monet, Snow at Argenteuil (1875) Looking more broadly, we can see two themes from this year’s selections. Several articles probe at the boundary where empirical science ends and metaphysics begins. John Tyndall argues that it is not outside of the scientist’s purview to discuss cosmological questions such as the origin of the universe. William Kingdon Clifford outlines the limits of applying scientific laws to predict both the distant past and remote future. W. R. Greg asks whether there are truths that cannot be discovered through human faculties. In economics, there is a clear embrace of the subjective theory of value. William Stanley Jevons’ popular account of the institutions facilitating exchange presents the subjective theory of value as the theory of value. George Darwin reconciles John Elliott Cairnes’ cost-of-production theory of value with Jevons’ marginal utility theory. In an odd article, Hen...