John Kells Ingram

John Kells Ingram (7 July 1823 – 1 May 1907) was an Irish poet, patriot and scholar, as well as an economist and historian of economic thought.

Ingram was born in Templecarne near Pettigo, County Donegal, of Scottish Presbyterian stock. At the age of 14, in 1837, he entered Trinity College, Dublin, and had a distinguished career there as a student, fellow and professor, successively of oratory, English Literature, and Greek, subsequently becoming the College Librarian and ultimately its Vice Provost. In his later career he became interested in the nascent disciplines of sociology and economics; in his 1888 History of Political Economy he used the term "economic man" as a critical description of the human being as conceived by economic theory, and he may have coined the term.

In 1843, Ingram wrote the poem for which he is best remembered, a ballad called "The Memory of the Dead", in honour of the Irish Rebellion of 1798 led by the United Irishmen. He was an advocate of Home Rule for Ireland, though within the context of a more general devolution within the United Kingdom.

Ingram was one of the scholars selected to write entries for two of the most famous editions of the Encyclopedia Britannica, namely the "scholars" or the ninth edition and the eleventh edition. According to his biographer S.D. Barrett, "Between 1882 and 1888 he wrote the entries in Encyclopedia Britannica on Pierre Leroux, Cliffe Leslie, John McCulloch, Georg Ludwig von Maurer, William Petty, Francois Quesnay, Karl Rau, David Ricardo, Jean Baptiste Say, Adam Smith, Jacques Turgot, and Arthur Young. He also wrote the entries on sumptuary laws and slavery. From 1891 to 1896 Ingram wrote the entries in Palgrave's Dictionary of Economics on Cliffe Leslie, Friedrich List, and Karl Marx.

He also wrote on labour and trade issues as well as on positivism."^{[citation needed]} A history of slavery and serfdom was based on his entries on slavery cited above. His entry on slavery began with French political economist and journalist Charles Dunoyer's view that "the economic regime of every society which has recently become sedentary is founded on the slavery of the industrial professions". Ingram who was a follower of Auguste Comte, states that Auguste Comte and Hume provided the best philosophy of slavery. He also cites WEB DuBois' Suppression of the African Slave Trade to the United States in his bibliography of the major works on slavery between the eighteenth and early twentieth century.

Ingram died in Dublin and is buried in Mount Jerome Cemetery.

Major publications

• A history of political economy (1888)
• A history of slavery and serfdom (1895) (reprinted in 2000)
• Human Nature and Morals according to A. Comte (1901)
• Sonnets and Other Poems (1902)
• Practical Morals (1904)
• The Final Transition (1905)

External links

• Biography of Ingram by S. D. Barrett, with emphasis on the origins of "The Memory of the Dead" and Ingram's contribution to Trinity College
• Text of A history of political economy at McMaster University

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