![](\"http:\/\/davidmhart.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/William_Hearn240.jpg\")
<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
I first came across the name William Hearn in Rothbard\u2019s history of economic thought where he discusses some early precursors of Austrian economics. ((Volume II: Classical Economics<\/em> (2006), \u201c14.8 Plutology: Hearn and Donisthorpe,\u201d pp. 463-65. See Hearn\u2019s bio page for an extract from this here<\/a>.))<\/p>\n That he lived and worked in Australia at the University of Melbourne (1854-88) was an added bonus. Hearn\u2019s book on Plutology<\/em> (1864) should really have been the second volume in the series CIS Classics<\/em> planned by the Centre for Independent Studies which only saw one volume published (2005) before it was aborted. That was Bruce Smith\u2019s Liberty and Liberalism<\/em> 1887) which I have resurrected and put online here<\/a>.<\/p>\n I have put online four of Hearn\u2019s books. He only wrote one on economics, the oddly named Plutology<\/em> (1865) ((From the Greek \u03c0\u03bb\u03bf\u1fe6\u03c4\u03bf\u03c2, ploutos<\/em>, \u2018wealth\u2019 , and \u03bb\u03cc\u03b3\u03bf\u03c2 logos<\/em> , \u2018speech\u2019, \u2018account\u2019, \u2018story\u2019.)) based on his lectures at the University of Melbourne. For decades it was the only economics book published in Australia until the 1920s, but since he was a laissez-faire free trader and, given the direction Australian economic policy went, nobody must have read it or taken any of its ideas to heart. The new Commonwealth of Australia which arose in 1901 was based on four sturdy pillars of statism, namely, protectionism, compulsory wage arbitration, the \u201cWhite\u201d Australia policy to prevent Asian immigration, and massive government ownership and control of infrastructure (or what was called at the time \u201cstate socialism\u201d). Hearn would have been appalled.<\/p>\n Hearn\u2019s contributions to economics have been dismissed by historians such as La Nauze as either superficial or plagiarised. ((J. A. La Nauze, \u201cHearn, William Edward (1826\u20131888)\u201d Australian Dictionary of Biography<\/em>, Volume 4, (Melbourne University Press, 1972).)) Rothbard\u2019s keen eye immediately saw that Hearns was moving in an entirely different direction to the mainstream \u201cclassical school\u201d against which Hearns has been improperly judged and compared. In my own reading I was struck by how \u201cBastiat-like\u201d his arguments were. Note especially this interesting chapter on the proper functions of the state: Chapter XXIII. \u201cOf the Impediments Presented to Industry by Government\u201d<\/a>.<\/p>\n The Australia economist Greg Moore at the University of Notre Dame ((Gregory Moore, \u201cThe Anglo-Irish context for William Edward Hearn\u2019s economic beliefs and the ultimate failure of his Plutology<\/em>,\u201d European Journal of the History of Economic Thought<\/em> (2009).)) also takes Hearn\u2019s ideas more seriously, seeing them as part of a much larger social theory about individual liberty and free societies, which he pursued in the volumes which followed Plutology<\/em> which dealt with law, the sociology of the family and the clan, and the rise of the state. I have put all these books online (in facs. PDF) to begin with, but have made an initial attempt at putting Plutology<\/em> in HTML<\/a> as well.<\/p>\n David Kemp in his multi-volume history of Australian liberalism also has some positive things to say about Hearn: David Kemp, A Free Country: Australia\u2019s Search for Utopia, 1861\u20131901<\/em> (Melbourne: The Miegunya Press, 2019). Section on Hearn in Chap. 10 \u201cLiberalism and the New Economics.\u201d<\/p>\n My collection of Hearn\u2019s books can be found here<\/a>. The HTML version of Plutology<\/em> here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I first came across the name William Hearn in Rothbard\u2019s history of economic thought where he discusses some early precursors of Austrian economics. ((Volume II: Classical Economics (2006), \u201c14.8 Plutology: Hearn and Donisthorpe,\u201d pp. 463-65. See Hearn\u2019s bio page for an extract from this here.)) That he lived and worked in Australia at the University … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_import_markdown_pro_load_document_selector":0,"_import_markdown_pro_submit_text_textarea":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[77],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-879","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-tradition"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/davidmhart.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/879","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/davidmhart.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/davidmhart.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/davidmhart.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/davidmhart.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=879"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/davidmhart.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/879\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":204254,"href":"http:\/\/davidmhart.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/879\/revisions\/204254"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/davidmhart.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=879"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/davidmhart.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=879"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/davidmhart.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=879"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}