George Douglas Campbell, 8th Duke of Argyll

Life

George John Douglas Campbell, 8th Duke of Argyll (30 April 1823 - 24 April 1900) was a prominent Liberal politician and man of letters of the 19th century.

A close associate of Prince Albert, he served as Lord Privy Seal in the cabinet of Lord Aberdeen, and then as Postmaster General in Lord Palmerston's first cabinet. He was again Privy Seal in the second Palmerston administration, where he was notable as a strong advocate of the Northern cause in the American Civil War.

In Gladstone's first government, Argyll became Secretary of State for India, in which role his refusal to promise support against the Russians to the Emir of Afghanistan helped lead to the Second Afghan War. In 1871, while actually serving in the Cabinet, his son and heir, Lord Lorne, married the Queen's daughter, Princess Louise, enhancing his status as a leading Grandee.

In 1880 he again served under Gladstone, as Lord Privy Seal, but resigned a year later in opposition to the government's Irish policy. In 1886, he fully broke with Gladstone over the question of Irish Home Rule, although he did not join the Liberal Unionists, but pursued an independent course. He died in 1900.

Scholarship

Argyll was not only a politician, but also an eminent scientist, or at least an eminent publicist on scientific matters, especially evolution and economics. He was a leader in the scholarly opposition against Darwinism (1869, 1884b) and an important reality-based (i.e., heterodox, non-classical) economist (1893) and institutionalist (1884a), in which latter capacity he was quite similar to his political opponent and predecessor as Lord Privy Seal when he held that position for a third time, Benjamin Disraeli, 1st Earl of Beaconsfield. While some of his works seemed quite strangely reactionary and obsolete at the times and for many decades, recent trends in scholarship - in evolutionary and institutional economics, as well as in ("post-genomic") biology - have led to some very positive reevaluation of his work.

Key Works

• (1869) Primeval Man: An Examination of some Recent Speculations. New York: Routledge.
• (1884a) The Reign of Law. London: Strahan.
• (1884b) The Unity of Nature. New York: Putnam.
• (1893) The Unseen Foundations of Society. An Examination of the Fallacies and Failures of Economic Science Due to Neglected Elements. London: John Murray.

Succession

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