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Francis Bowen, 1811-1890.
American clergyman, historian and philosopher and the first teacher of economics at Harvard.
Francis Bowen, affectionately known as "Fanny" Bowen to his students, was an editor of the North American Review and controversial historian and philosopher at Harvard.
Francis Bowen was a native of Charlestown, Massachusetts, and graduated from Harvard in 1833, while teaching part-time at the Exeter academy. In 1835, Bowen became an instructor in intellectual philosophy, but resigned in 1839 to undertake a European tour. Bowen stayed for a while in Paris, where he met and befriended Sismondi, and absorbed his critiques of Classical economics. Bowen was critical of the work of Mill, found the Malthusian population doctrines "absurd and pernicious" and the free trade doctrines of the Manchester School rather dubious.
Bowen's early interests were primarily in philosophy. Bowen had taken aboard a distaste for New England transcendentalism and Kantian philosophy (Bown has been called an forerunner of American pragmatism - Charles S. Peirce and William James were Bowen's students). Despite his affinity with Lockean empiricism and Scottish common sense philosophy (Bowen put out an edition of Dugald Stewart's works and was a stout defender of Sir William Hamilton), Bowen also nurtured some peculiar anti-British prejudices (e.g.).
Bowen returned from Europe in late 1841, and the very next year bought a controlling interest in the North American Review. Bowen would be a frequent contributor and editor of the North American Review in the 1840s and 1850s.
Bowen reconnected with Harvard and delivered the Lowell lectures in 1848-49. In 1850, Francis Bowen was selected as McLean professor of history at Harvard (succeeding Jared Sparks, who had ascended to the presidency). Despite not being yet confirmed by the Harvard board, Bowen began teaching in the Fall semester of 1850. However, a series of politically-outspoken articles in the NAR - notably a defense of the 1850 Compromise and two controversial articles highly critical of the Hungarian uprising - cost him his job. Although recommended by the Harvard faculty, in February 1851, the Board of Overseers, wary of Bowen's political positions, refused to confirm Bowen and gave the McLean chair to someone else. This sparked a brief row over academic freedom at Harvard. But a significant cause for Bowen's dismissal was doubts about his scholarship; Bowen was accused of outright plagiarism - the bulk of Bowen's Hungarian articles had been essentially copied, almost word for word, from a pair of French articles in the conservative Revue des Deux Mondes (a charge brought to light by Boston journalist Robert Carter in a series of articles in the Boston Atlas in 1850).
Nonetheless, with the ascension of James Walker as the new president of Harvard in 1853, Bowen fortunes were restored and Francis Bowen was appointed Alford Professor of Natural Religion, Moral Philosophy and Civil Polity. Responding to the notion that some familiarity with political economy was part of the education of every "gentleman", Bowen began to teach the first courses on political economy at Harvard College.
Unwilling to use a British book, Francis Bowen composed his own 1859 textbook on political economy. It was a conscious "adaptation" of Classical economics to the "American situation" (esp. lack of population pressure). As befit the religious conditions of the Alford Professorship, Bowen dutifully infused the text relating the economic system to Divine Providence (however, in his religious ideas, Bowen was an outspoken Unitarian). Although politically conservative in most respects, Bowen's predilection for a loose "greenback" policy brought him into conflict with the conservative trustees. To shield Harvard students from Bowen's "dangerous" ideas, the grandees of Massachusetts funded a separate chair of political economy. In 1872, they appointed a new "hard money" economist (Charles Dunbar) to that chair. Dunbar subsequently took over Bowen's responsibilities in economics.
On a side-note, Bowen was one of the first American reviewers of Charles Darwin's Origin of the Species, but found his theory of evolution altogether improbable and absurd. Bowen criticized Darwin not only because his conclusions went against common sense natural philosophy, but also because its speculative basis and insufficient reliance on empirical evidence seemed unscientific (1860, 1861).
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