SENIOR, NASSAU WILLIAM English economist, was born at Compton, Berks, on Sept. 26, 179o, the eldest son of the Rev. J. R. Senior, vicar of Durnford, Wilts. He was educated at Eton and Magdalen College, Oxford; took the degree of B.A. in 1811, was called to the bar in 1819, and in 1836, during the chancellorship of Lord Cottenham, was appointed a master in chancery. On the foundation of the Drummond chair of political economy at Oxford in 1825, Senior was elected to fill the post, which he occupied till 183o, and again from 1847 to 1852. In 183o he was requested by Lord Melbourne to inquire into the state of combinations and strikes, to report on the state of law and to suggest improvements in it. Senior was a member of many royal commissions. He died at Kensington on June 4, His writings on economic theory consisted of an article in the Encyclopaedia Metropolitana, afterwards separately published as An Outline of the Science of Political Economy (1836), and his lectures delivered at Oxford, several of which were separately printed. A collection of them appeared in French under the title of Principes Fondamentaux d'Economie Politique (1835). Senior also wrote works on administrative and social questions. His contributions to the reviews were collected in volumes entitled Essays on Fiction (1864) ; Biographical Sketches (1865, chiefly of noted lawyers) ; and Historical and Philosophical Essays (1865). In 1859 appeared his Journal kept in Turkey and Greece in the Autumn of 1857 and the Beginning of 1858.
Senior regards political economy as a purely deductive science, derivable from four elementary propositions. The premises from
which it sets out are, according to him, not assumptions but facts. The science concerns itself, however, with wealth only, and can give no practical counsel for political action : it can only suggest considerations which the politician should keep in view in study ing the questions with which he has to deal. In several in stances Senior improved the forms in which accepted doctrines were habitually stated. He also did excellent service by pointing out the disadvantages of Ricardo's terminology—as, for example, his use of "value" in the sense of "cost of production," and of "high" and "low" wages in the sense of a certain proportion of the product as distinguished from an absolute amount, and his peculiar employment of the epithets "fixed" and "circulating" as applied to capital. He shows, too, that in numerous instances the premises assumed by Ricardo are false.
Besides adopting some terms, such as that of "natural agents," from Say, Senior introduced the word "abstinence"—which, though obviously not free from objection, is for some purposes useful—to express the conduct of the capitalist which is re munerated by interest ; but in defining "cost of production" as the sum of labour and abstinence necessary to production he failed to see that an amount of labour and an amount of abstinence are disparate, and do not admit of reduction to a common quantita tive standard. He added some important considerations to what had been said by Smith on the division of labour.