A History of Political Economy

John Kells Ingram (1823-1907) was an Irish poet, patriot and scholar, as well as an economist and historian of economic thought. In his 1888 History of Political Economy he used the term "economic man" as a critical description of the human being as conceived by economic theory, and he may have coined the term. In 1843, Ingram wrote the poem for which he is best remembered, a ballad called The Memory of the Dead. He was an advocate of Home Rule for Ireland, though within the context of a more general devolution within the United Kingdom. He was one of the scholars selected to write entries for two of the most famous editions of the Encyclopedia Britannica.