Senior, Nassau William (1790–1864)

Nassau William Senior was a noted economist who also held several government commissions. He was appointed to the first endowed chair of political economy at Oxford in 1825. After the first edition of An Outline of the Science of Political Economy was published in Encyclopedia Metropolitana in 1836, a revised and expanded edition appeared as a separate volume in 1850. Senior defined political economy as the science that investigates the [Page 458]nature, production, and distribution of wealth. He employs the term wealth as a synonym for value, and, like the economists before him, includes utility as one of the three causes of value. Utility is “the power, direct or indirect, of producing pleasure, including under that term gratification of every kind, or of preventing pain, ...