The quintessential British eccentric, Henry Dunning Macleod remains among the more colorful figures in economics. Macleod was a Cambridge-trained lawyer and financier as well as an amateur economist. He wrote many large books on economic theory and monetary theory in a remarkable yet bizarre language - he littered his books with juristic terms, obscure references from antiquity and peculiar mathematics. Vehemently opposed to the labor theory of value, Macleod developed a subjectivist "supply and demand" mechanism for setting long-term prices - including the concept of the diminishing marginal utility - and was duly acknowledged as a predecessor to the Marginalist Revolution by Jevons. He was a champion of the "scientific" character of economics - calling it the "Queen of the social sciences".
Macleod turned his remarkable skills as a barrister into vehement attacks on and dissection of the logic of the Classical Ricardian theorists -- an effort which earned him few friends and brought upon himself the wrath of Alfred Marshall -- thereby keeping him out of the academic mainstream for life. His repeated attempts to acquire a university chairs were also marred by his involvement in a contemporary financial scandal.
Macleod's work on banking was however better received - it was Macleod who coined the
term "Gresham's Law" (bad money drives out good). His "credit theory"
of money and wealth is laid out many places laid out in his Theory of
Credit (1889) and elsewhere. This is perhaps his most original achievement,
although it is anticipated to a good degree by the "anti-metallist" theories of Berkeley, Law, Boisguilbert
and Steuart. Although he formed no school, he had a
faithful follower in Michel Chevalier at
the Collčge de France.
Major works of Henry Dunning Macleod
Resources on H.D. Macleod