On the 'Dismal Science'

The once commonly held assumption that Carlyle’s directed the phrase “dismal science” toward the economics of Malthus (or Ricardo) has been thoroughly discredited. In fact, Carlyle does not seem to have much to say about Malthus or Ricardo throughout his writings.

Carlyle did use the word dismal in reference to Malthus ("The controversies on Malthus and the 'Population Principle', 'Preventative Check' and so forth, with which the public ear has been deafened for a long while, are indeed sufficiently mournful. Dreary, stolid, dismal, without hope for this world or the next, is all that of the preventative check and the denial of the preventative check." In Chartism, 1839).

Carlyle actually used the phrase “dismal science” in reference to a notion of racial equality advanced by John Stuart Mill. Carlyle justified slavery by believed that African laborers were morally inferior to white planters, who could legitimately force them to work. This argument countered Mill’s beliefs against racial inferiority and forced labor. Carlyle’s 1849 essay “An Occasional Discourse on the Negro Question” argued for the reintroduction of slavery into the West Indies, and directed against Mill the comment that liberal economics was not “a 'gay science,' I should say, like some we have heard of; no, a dreary, desolate and, indeed, quite abject and distressing one; what we might call, by way of eminence, the dismal science”

Interestingly, the phrase “gay science” against which Carlyle says “dismal science, derives from a Provençal expression (gaya scienza) used later by Nietzsche:

The “Songs of Prince Free-as-a-Bird,” written for the most part in Sicily, are quite emphatically reminiscent of the Provençal concept of gaya scienza – that unity of singer, knight, and free spirit which distinguishes the wonderful early culture of the Provençals from all equivocal cultures. The very last poem above all, “To the Mistral,” an exuberantly dancing song in which, if I may say so, one dances right over morality, is a perfect Provençalism. (in Ecce Homo)

Notwithstanding the above, the popular misconception contains a grain of truth. Mill’s political economy – along with similar strains of Benthanism or Utilitarianism – were criticized for attempting to reduce human behavior to mathematical formulae. In this sense, the Utilitarian spirit of economics was indeed dismal.