Haoming Liu

Research Topic

That Sublime Science of Political Economy: the Making of the "Dismal Science" in Britain, 1817-1848

Supervisor: Brian Young

My DPhil project explores the field of inquiry of political economy in early nineteenth-century Britain between 1817 and 1848, a period marked by the publication of David Ricardo's Principles of Political Economy and Taxation and John Stuart Mill's Principles of Political Economy with Some of Their Applications to Social Philosophy. Instead of focusing on specific doctrines, theories, or policies, my overall concern is more with the form of discipline through which the vague and nearly mystified concept of "political economy" took place, or more precisely, impressed upon a various group of social thinkers. In other words, I am particularly interested in how the study of political economy was conceived as a process of mental cultivation (or degeneration, for a fairly large group of people). Tentative themes that I seek to address: the separation, or "disembeddedness", of political economy from moral philosophy curriculum; the scientification debate of political economy against the background of English university revival; the nature of Ricardian orthodoxy; an "anti-economism" that bonded together "moralists" and "conservative romantics." The DPhil thesis serves partly as a continuation to my MPhil research on Adam Smith, where I explored Smith's suppressed expression of aesthetics in relation to his moral philosophy and political economy. 

I am from Nanjing, China. I earned my BA in Economics and Applied Math (minoring in Political Science and Critical Theory) at Macalester College in Minnesota, USA, and completed an MPhil in Intellectual History at Oxford. My postgraduate research is largely a result of my (very personal) reflection and contemplation of the modern discipline of economics. More broadly, I am interested in the history and philosophy of social science, musicology, and critical theory. I do music amateurly.