Nassau William Senior

Senior was the first holder of the Drummond chair in political economy at Oxford, occupying it from 1825 to 1830 and again from 1847 to 1852. He trained as a lawyer and earned his living at it. His lasting mark was administrative rather than academic: he sat on the royal commission into the Poor Laws from 1832, wrote most of its report alongside Edwin Chadwick, and so shaped the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834 and the workhouse system that followed it. In theory he is remembered for treating interest as the reward for abstinence, and for the claim that a manufacturer's entire profit arrived in the final hour of the working day, an argument Marx took apart at length in Capital. The lectures themselves survive in print, among them the 1829 series on the value of money and the introductory course that opened his professorship. He lived from 1790 to 1864.