Book 3, Chapter 2, Footnote #04
Cairnes' view
It is from this point of view that Cairnes' interesting and persuasive essay on ``Political Economy and Laissez Faire'' (in his Essays in Political Economy Theoretical and Applied) appears to me most defective. Cairnes reaches the conclusion that laissez faire, though the safest ``practical rule'', yet ``falls to the ground as a scientific doctrine'', by pointing to actual shortcomings in the production and distribution of social utility, and tracing these to the mistaken notions that men form of their interests. But this reasoning seems to me palpably inconclusive, according to the view of Political Economy as a hypothetical science, which Cairnes elsewhere expounds (Logical Method of Political Economy, Lect. ii.). What on this view he has to prove is that there is any less reason for regarding laissez fiaire as a doctrine of this hypothetical science than there is for so regarding those deductive determinations of the values of products and services which might equally well be shown not to correspond exactly---nor, in all cases, even approximately---to the actual facts of existing societies. This, then, is the point to which I chiefly direct attention in the present chapter.