CAIRNES, JOHN ELLIOTT (1823-1875), British polit ical economist of the classical school, was born at Castle Belling ham, Co. Louth, Ireland, and educated at Trinity college, Dublin. He then studied law, and was called to the Irish bar. But he had little taste for the practice of law, and devoted himself to the study of political economy, and to journalism mainly on Irish social and economic questions. In 1856, through the influence of Archbishop Whateley, he was elected Whateley professor of po litical economy at Trinity college, Dublin. The lectures delivered in 1856 were published as The Character and Logical Method of Political Economy.
In 1861 Cairnes was appointed professor of political economy and jurisprudence at Queen's college, Galway, and in 1866 pro fessor of political economy at University college, London. His health was already seriously undermined when he came to Lon don, and he resigned in 1872. He died at Blackheath, London, on July 8, The principal works of Prof. Cairnes, in addition to those al ready mentioned, were : The Slave Power (1862), in which he expounded the inherent disadvantages of slave labour, and gave a well-founded forecast of the probable issue of the struggle in America which influenced in a marked degree serious opinion in England on the case for the North ; Political Essays (1873), con taining his papers on Irish questions, especially on the educational system ; and his largest work, Some Principles of Political Econ omy, Newly Expounded (1874). This last work does not profess to be a complete treatise; in it Cairnes expands and discusses the theories of value, cost of production, wages, labour and capital, international value, as laid down in the works of Smith, Ricardo and Mill. While Cairnes was generally in agreement with Mill, he analysed his propositions in a way which was often destructive.
Cairnes's principal contributions to the science of economies were his exposition of the province and method of political econ omy, his analysis of the cost of production in relation to value, theory of the limitations imposed by the division of classes on free competition, and his defence and development of the wages fund doctrine after it had been abandoned by Mill. He regarded political economy as a science, and therefore neutral in its results with regard to social facts or systems. He was an economist of the theoretical school, and opposed those who de sired to treat political economy as an integral part of social philosophy, and those who, like Jevons, sought to express economic facts in quantitative formulae. In his day he held an authority second only to that of Mill.