Nassau William Senior

Nassau William Senior ( born September 26, 1790 in Compton, Berkshire, † June 4, 1864 in Kensington ) was an English economist, eldest son of JR Senior, vicar of Durnford, Wiltshire.

Life

Senior was educated at Eton College and Magdalen College, Oxford. At university he studied privately with Richard Whately, who later became Archbishop of Dublin, with whom he had life-long friends. Bachelor's degree in 1811, then he settled down as a lawyer. In the creation of the Chair of Political Economy at Oxford in 1825 was appointed senior professor on this chair he held until 1830, and later from 1847 to 1852. He was throughout his life a member of several government commissions, and has been involved in the reform of English labor law.

Some became famous for Senior by his writing in 1837 published against the English factory laws and against the shortening of working hours of twelve hours a day ( " Letters on the Factory Act, as it Affects the Cotton Manufacture" ), with whom he believed to prove that a statutory reduction of working time of one hour must bring about the ruin of the cotton manufacturers, because the entire profit produced in just the last hour, they deal with them their workers. In this document, it was an opinion, with its creation Senior had been commissioned in 1836 by the great cotton industrialists from Manchester. Karl Marx dedicates this document under the heading " Seniors last hour " five pages in the first volume of his major work, the capital.