HONORARY MEMBERS
The ESHET Council may offer honorary membership to distinguished scholars in the field of the history of economic thought.
Honorary members nominated so far are:
Mary Morgan (2023)
Mary Morgan is Albert O. Hirschman Professor of the History and Philosophy of Economics at the London School of Economics. At LSE she received her Ph.D. in Economics and then became Full Professor in 1999. Among her many honours, she is current President of the Royal Economic Society (2023-2024), overseas member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences since 2002 and Distinguished Fellow of the History of Economics Society (2013). Elected Fellow of the British Academy since 2002, at the British Academy she gave the Keynes Lecture in 2013 and was vice-President in the years 2014-2018.
Mary Morgan has contributed extensively to painting a picture of economics as a quantitative science and to clarifying the methodological issues surrounding the use of models as theoretical tools. She has published widely on the economists’ practices of measuring and modelling. Among her seminal contributions to the history of economics, The History of Econometric Ideas (1990) (Cambridge University Press), The Foundations of Econometric Analysis (1995) (with D.F. Hendry, Cambridge University Press), From Interwar Pluralism to Post-War Neoclassicism (1998) (edited with M. Rutherford, History of Political Economy, Annual Supplement, Duke University Press), Models as Mediators (1999) (with M. Morrison, Cambridge University Press), The World in the Model. How Economists work and think(2012) (Cambridge University Press). Her most recent project is an ERC on Narrative Science from which her recent Narrative in Economics: Historical Experiences (2023) (Edited with Tom Stapleford, Special Issue of History of Political Economy, vol. 55:3) has emerged.
Pascal Bridel (2022)
Université de Lausanne
Sheila Dow (2021)
Sheila Dow is Professor Emeritus of Economics at the University of Stirling, Scotland, Adjunct Professor of Economics at the University of Victoria, Canada, and a member of the Institute of New Economic Thinking Academic Council. Her academic career has been marked by a series of major contributions on a range of topics. She studied for her Ph.D. degree in Economics at the University of Glasgow (1978-81); her thesis was entitled “Money and Real Economic Disparities between Nations and between Regions”. Alongside continuing interest in this topic, she focused more specifically on methodological issues in the fields of macroeconomics, money and banking and questions related to the endogeneity of money. Sheila Dow is also well-known for her contribution to the history of economic thought - in particular in relation to Hume, Smith, and Keynes. One of her most famous books - The Methodology of Macroeconomic Thought - was published in 1996 and contributed to work at the interface between history of macroeconomics and methodologies of macroeconomics. The 2008 financial crisis confirmed her in questioning the capacity of Dynamic Stochastic General Equilibrium models to explain the observed fluctuations and to generate economic policy solutions. In response she formulated a methodological critique based on the understanding that the future of macroeconomics requires a new ontological basis.’ Her more recent books which include Foundations for New Economic Thinking (Palgrave Macmillan 2012), and co-edited volumes The General Theory and Keynes. The 2008 financial crisis confirmed her in questioning [or: led her to question] the capacity of Dynamic Stochastic General Equilibrium models to explain the observed fluctuations and to generate economic policy solutions. In response she formulated a methodological critique based on the understanding that the future of macroeconomics requires a new ontological basir the 21st Century (Edward Elgar, 2018) and Money, Method and Post-Keynesian Economics for the 21st Century (Edward Elgar, 2018) reveal her deep interest in the Keynesian and post-Keynesian economics. In the course of her career, she has held the position of Chair of INEM and co-editor of Economic Thought, and served as a member of the Academic Advisory Board of the Independent Social Research Foundation. Finally, any portrait of Sheila Dow would be incomplete without emphasising her rare ability to follow a dual career. Alongside her academic work she has held positions at the Bank of England and the Government of Manitoba, and acted as special advisor on monetary policy to the UK Treasury Select Committee.
Emma Rothschild (2020)
Emma Rothschild is a British economic historian who is the Jeremy and Jane Knowles Professor of History and the director of the Joint Centre for History and Economics at Harvard University. She is also a Fellow of Magdalene College, Cambridge and Professeur invitée, Centre d’histoire de Sciences Po, Paris. Emma Rothschild is well-known in our community for her penetrating writings on economic history and the history of economic thought. She specializes in 18th century and 19th century history. Her recent publications include ;Isolation and Economic Life in Eighteenth-Century ; (American Historical Review, October 2014) The Archives of Universal History (Journal of World History, September 2008), “A Horrible Tragedy in the French Atlantic” (Past and Present, August 2006), Economic Sentiments: Adam Smith, Condorcet and the Enlightenment (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001), The Inner Life of Empires: An Eighteenth-Century History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011), and An Infinite History: The Story of a Family in France over Three Centuries (Princeton University Press, 2021).
As director of the Joint Centre for History and Economics, she is involved in collaborative research projects, at Sciences Po, the University of Cambridge and at Harvard, on Economic History, Climate and the Environment, Exchanges of Economic, Legal and Political Ideas and on Visualizing Historical Networks. Amongst her other positions in prestigious institutions or scientific committees the following can be mentioned: from 1982 she taught at the École Des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) in Paris and she formerly served as Board Member of the United Nations Foundation. Since 2018 she has been a member of the scientific Committee of the CNRS.
Heinz Rieter (2019)
Heinz Rieter was born in Weimar in 1937 and grew up in Erfurt, then in the German Democratic Republic. In 1955 he moved to West-Berlin and took up studies in Economics at Freie Universität Berlin. After graduation, Rieter worked at his alma mater as research assistant from 1962 until 1965, when he moved to the newly founded Ruhr-Universität Bochum (RUB). There he received a doctoral degree in 1969, for his dissertation on Thomas Tooke and contemporaneous monetary theory, and held the position of a senior lecturer. From 1984 until 2004 he was professor in economics with a focus on the history of economic thought and monetary economics at the University of Hamburg. Rieter is a very active member of the Ausschuss für die Geschichte der Wirtschaftswissenschaften (history of economic thought committee) in the Verein für Socialpolitik, the major association of economists in the German language area. He presided over the committee from 1990-94 and is still generally regarded as its spiritus rector with wise and rich comments at the committee’s meetings. He is also among the initiators and scientific directors of the PhD seminar in the history of economic thought in Erfurt giving great stimulus and support to young scholars. Rieter was also involved in ESHET activities in the early years, attending the annual meetings and serving as Council member from 1996 until 2002. It was he who fervently recommended to use the owl of Athena as logo for ESHET. He also contributed an article on the genesis of German Ordoliberalism to the very first issue of The European Journal of the History of Economic Thought which meanwhile has become a classic. Rieter has not published much in English, but his œuvre in the German language is impressive in terms of its erudition. Main contributions focus on Quesnay´s Tableau Économique, Justi´s theory of economic policy, Walter Bagehot, Gustav Schmoller, Alfred Marshall and monetary theory. His long surveys on “Autobiographies and Memoirs of Economists” and on the origins of economics at the Free University of Berlin after World War II have become standard works in the German language area. In this, he has not shied away from uncovering how some of his professors at the Free University had in their earlier lives been involved in Nazi planning of the Third Reich’s murderous expansion into Eastern Europe. Heinz Rieter, undoubtedly, is one of the greatest experts on the life and work of Johann Heinrich Thünen. He has great merits on the survival of Thünen´s old farm as a research and conference centre. Besides several outstanding articles on Thünen the collection of Thünen´s letters is particularly worth mentioning.
Pierluigi Ciocca (2018)
Pierluigi Ciocca is an eminent scholar and central banker, with a wide variety of interests. He is an authority on monetary theory and history, central banking and Italian economic thought and policy-making. He is a renowned specialist on the Italian school of economics and finance. Among his publications are: “Money and The Economy. Central Bankers Views" (Editor, Macmillan, 1991), "The High Price of Money. An Interpretation of World Interest Rates" (with Giangiacomo Nardozzi, Clarendon Press, 1997), “Roots of the Italian School of Economics and Finance. From Ferrara (1857) to Einaudi (1944)” (editor, with Mario Baldassarri, three volumes, Palgrave Macmillan, 2001), and "Stabilising Capitalism. A Greater Role for Central Banks" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), as well as other books (mostly in Italian), articles and other contributions. Also in his analysis of contemporary issues, he takes great care to put them in a historical perspective. As he observed in the preamble to "The High Price of Money”: “We have felt it necessary to start from a reflection on the ultimate significance of the theory of interest by returning to the foundations laid by Wicksell, Fisher, and Keynes”. At the Bank of Italy he strongly promoted the Historical Research and Historical Archives Service. He also played a key role in the acquisition of the Lionel Robbins Library by the Bank of Italy and the microfilms of the Keynes, Kahn, Kaldor and Joan Robinson Papers from the Modern Archives, King’s College, Cambridge, making them fully accessible through the Bank Library Service. He has been a professor at the Universities of Macerata, Roma “La Sapienza” and LUISS Guido Carli.
Anthony Brewer (2017)
Anthony Brewer was a distinguished academic and an eminent scholar in the history of economic thought. He was an Emeritus Professor of the History of Economics at the University of Bristol. Anthony Brewer was an authority on eighteenth century French and British economic thought. He published several books, among them: The Making of the Classical Theory of Economic Growth, Richard Cantillon: Pioneer of Economic Theory, Marxist Theories of Imperialism, a Critical Survey and A Guide to Marx’s Capital, as well as many articles and reviews in professional journals and edited volumes. At various dates, he served as Secretary, Vice-President, and elected member of the Executive Committee of the European Society for the History of Economic Thought. He served also as book review editor for the Bulletin of the European Society for the History of Economic Thought. He was a member of the editorial advisory boards of History of Political Economy (USA), Journal of the History of Economic Thought (USA), and History of Economic Ideas (Italy). He held visiting positions at Duke University (North Carolina), Antwerp University (Belgium) and Chuo University (Tokyo).
Joel Mokyr (2016)
Joel Mokyr is one of the foremost economic historians of the industrial revolution and of the Enlightenment, who has published about a dozen books and some 90 papers in leading economic history journals as well as in general economics journals like JEL and AER. His papers and books are recognized by scholars from many different fields, including historians of economic thought and economic theorists, and several of his books have had remarkably high print-runs. For many years, Joel Mokyr has held a double professorship at Northwestern University, as Professor of Arts and Science and as Professor of Economics and History. In addition, he has also taught regularly at the University of Tel Aviv. Mokyr is probably best-known for his contributions to the history of technology and technological change, and for propagating an evolutionary approach to economic history. Amongst his publications are: Why Ireland Starved: An Analytical and Quantitative History of Irish Poverty 1800-1851 (1985; George Allen & Unwin), The Lever of Riches: Technological Creativity and Economic Progress (1990; Oxford University Press), The Gifts of Athena: Historical Origins of the Knowledge Economy (2002; Princeton University Press); The Invention of Enterprise. Entrepreneurship from Ancient Mesopotamia to Modern Times (co-editor with W. Baumol and D. S. Landes, 2009, Princeton University Press), The Enlightened Economy: An Economic History of Britain 1700-1850 (2010; Yale University Press).
Charles Goodhart (2015)
Charles Goodhart is an eminent scholar (and policy-maker) in the areas of monetary economics and financial stability. He is well known for the so-called “Goodhart’s Law”. Throughout his career he has shown a keen historical interest, both in the history of economic ideas and economic history. Some of his most important (historical) books were: The New York Money Market and the Finance of Trade, 1900-1913 (1969), The Business of Banking, 1891-1914 (1972), The Evolution of Central Banks (1988), Financial Crises, Contagion and the Lender of Last Resort (with G. Illing, eds., 2002) The Basel Committee on Banking Supervision: The History of the Early Years 1974–1997 (2011). Charles Goodhart formulated himself very beautifully his interest in the history of economic thought in his Preface to The New York Money Market and the Finance of Trade, 1900-191 (1969, p. I): “My interest in this particular subject was aroused and maintained by the stimulating analyses of the contemporary situation written by the great economists of the period 1900-1913, economists such as E.W. Kemmerer, A.P. Andrew, and O.M.W. Sprague. I have attempted in this book to revise some of the accepted hypotheses of that day about the functioning of the financial system, but I neither could nor would have done this without being able to build on the secure foundation of their work.”
Anthony M.C. Waterman (2014)
Anthony Waterman read Economics at Cambridge where he was supervised in his final year by Joan Robinson. After five years as a business economist in Montreal he studied Theology at St John’s College Winnipeg and was ordained to the priesthood. His bishop determined that he should have an academic ministry, and directed him to take a doctorate in Economics (rather than in Theology, as his college had proposed). He therefore spent three years at the Australian National University under the supervision of N. G. Butlin and T. W. Swan, studying the post-war Australian business cycle. His thesis became his first book. He returned to Winnipeg in 1967 at the direction of his bishop and taught Economics at the University of Manitoba until retirement in 2006. He resigned his orders in 1982.
In 1979-80 Waterman was Maurice Reckitt Fellow in Christian Social Thought at the University of Sussex, where he met Donald Winch and began what has been his research program ever since: aspects of the relation between Christian Theology and Economic Theory, including the study of Christian social thought. He began with an examination of Malthus’s first Essay, and all his subsequent work is to some extent a spin-off of that investigation: his historical account of ‘Christian Political Economy’; his papers on the intellectual world of 18th C. Cambridge; his analytical studies of the political economy of Adam Smith, Paley, Chalmers and of Malthus himself; his methodological work on Whately and others, and the epistemological relation of religious to scientific ‘knowledge’; his methodological work on the identity of the ‘History of Economic Thought’; his analytical and historical studies of Papal Social Doctrine; and his recent study, with Steven Medema, of Paul Samuelson as historian of economic thought. He was elected Distinguished Fellow of the History of Economics Society in 2007.
Pierre Dockès (2013)
Born in 1939, Pierre Dockès is Emeritus Professor of Economics at Université Lumière/Lyon 2. Graduated from the Faculty of law and economics in Lyon, he wrote a PhD under the supervision of Claude Ponsard devoted to “L’espace dans la pensée économique : étude des auteurs français et anglais du XVIe siècle au XVIIIe siècle” (1965). From this work, he published L’Espace dans la pensée économique du XVIe au XVIIIe siècle (1969, italian translation, Milan, Feltrinelli, 1971). In 1967, Pierre Dockès was appointed as lecturer in the Faculty of law and economics in Dijon. Two years later, he succeeded the “concours d’agrégation” and was appointed professor in the Saint-Etienne University. In 1971, he moved to the University of Lyon, where he taught many courses such as international economics, economic fluctuations and growth, and history of economic thought. In 1984, he founded the research team “Centre Auguste et Léon Walras”, specialized in history of economic thought, which will be associated with the CNRS. Until 1997, he was director of this center. He is currently a member of the CNRS research team “Triangle - Action, discours pensée politique et économique” (Ecole normale supérieure de Lyon, Lumière-Lyon 2 University, Institut de sciences politiques de Lyon). He is associate editor of Oeconomia. History, methodology, philosophy.
The range of Pierre Dockès’s favorite topics during his academic career is extremely wide. Initially, he worked on the question of space in the history of economic thought from XVIth to XVIIIth century. Later, launching with a group of colleagues the project of the collected economic works of Auguste and Léon Walras (Oeuvres économiques complètes, Paris, Economica, 1987-2005, 14 vol.), Pierre Dockès contributed to the publication of several volumes of Léon Walras, while being interested in his epistemology and his “social economics” (La Société n’est pas un pique-nique. Léon Walras et l’économie sociale, Paris, Economica, 1996). Influenced by the historian Fernand Braudel, Pierre Dockès is interested in the large-scale economic and social changes in the longue durée. Especially, he worked on the transition from slavery to the medieval society (Medieval Slavery and Liberation, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1982). He also considered slavery in Modern times (the “sugar paradigm”), which led him to wonder about globalization and its effects. In collaboration with Bernard Rosier, he studied the mutations which stress the history of capitalism with the consideration of the characteristics of several “productive orders” which follow one another since the Industrial Revolution and of the specificities of the great depressions. Lastly, Pierre Dockès was interested in the setting-up of a political economy of power and authority, with a research on Thomas Hobbes’s economic and political thought (Hobbes. Economie, terreur et politique, Paris, Economica, 2008).
Odd Langholm (2012)
Odd Langholm was born in 1928 and entered the Norwegian School of Economics (NSE) as a student in 1951. This institution has remained his alma mater throughout his long and eventful career. After periods in the USA as visiting scholar in Chicago and Philadelphia, he obtained the title of doctor oeconomiae in 1966. Langholm was made doctor honoris causae at Aabo Academy, an event followed by a gradually increasing acknowledgement of his academic standard, expressed, inter alia, by being rewarded NSE’s own diploma for excellent scholarship.
For about the first half of his academic life, Odd Langholm thus studied and taught modern economics, mainly microeconomics, with its links to business practice and policy. Then, with the growth of national wealth following the oil boom, Norway experienced a remarkable invigoration of social institutions, including teaching and research. An opening appeared for O. Langholm, whose favorite subjects, even in the lean years, had been medieval economic history and research. A new academic chair was established for him, and for the period of almost a decade, Langholm trawled libraries and archives throughout Europe in the search of manuscripts and early printed works with a bearing on his project.
He published extensively on Medieval economic thought and was immediately recognized as an outstanding scholar and a leading authority in this field of research. Select books: Price and Value in the Aristotelian Tradition (1979); Economics in the Medieval Schools (1992); The Legacy of Scholasticism in Economic Thought (1998); The Merchant in the Confessional (2003).
Donald Winch (2011)
Donald Winch was born on 15 April 1935 and graduated from the London School of Economics in 1956, after which he went to Princeton for his graduate work, where he was supervised by Jacob Viner and awarded a PhD in 1960. He returned to a post at the University of Edinburgh in 1960, then moved in 1963 to the University of Sussex, which had admitted its first students in 1961. He remained at Sussex for the remainder of his academic career, retiring as Professor of the History of Economics in 2000; he also held visiting appointments at the Institute of Advanced Study, Princeton (1974-5), Australian National University (1983), Cambridge (1989), the University of Kyoto (1992) and All Souls, Oxford (1994). Since 1971 he has been publications secretary of the Royal Economic Society, also serving as Book Review Editor for the Economic Journal from 1976-1983. In 1986 he was elected to the British Academy. His present position is Emeritus Professor at the University of Sussex.
There are broadly three phases in the development of Winch’s work. His graduate studies focussed on the Classical economists and resulted in his first two major publications, a revised and extended version of his doctoral dissertation being published as Classical Political Economy and Colonies in 1965, and his edition of James Mill’s economic writings appearing in 1966. He then turned to the linkage of economics and economic policy in the twentieth century, publishing a popular survey as Economics and Policy in 1969 and then collaborating with Susan Howson on a study of the work of the Economics Advisory Council of the 1930s in 1976. By this time his interest was turning back to Adam Smith and the eighteenth century, his Adam Smith’s Politics of 1978 marking a clear shift away from the more conventional prevailing economic framework for work in the history of economic thought. This move was related to the influence of his Sussex colleagues John Burrow (1935-2009) and Stefan Collini, who were instrumental in developing the study of intellectual history at Sussex. With Burrow and Collini he authored That Noble Science of Politics (1983), moving then to his important study of the Smithian legacy in Riches and Poverty (1996) and the post-Classical course of economic argument in Britain as Wealth and Life (2009).
Winch began his career as an economist with a specialist interest in the history of economics, typical of the new generation of scholars of the 1960s who played a major role in the formation of national societies dedicated to the history of economic thought, and the first specialist journal, History of Political Economy. However, as the study of the history of economics became more specialised, it was also increasingly marginalised by the development of the discipline of economics. Winch was extremely fortunate to have been at the University of Sussex during this development, since the university sought to promote interdisciplinary work and its institutional design was intended to obstruct academic specialisation and foster collaborative research and teaching. The university in which he worked therefore encouraged his collaboration with Burrow and Collini (two intellectual historians), enabling Winch to follow his interests and move towards an emerging practice of the history of economics which was more explicitly historical. It was this context which enabled him to write Adam Smith’s Politics and, in his 40s, make a major contribution to the subsequent reorientation of the study of Adam Smith and classical economics. This represented a development of the study of the history of economics as he had learned it from Jacob Viner, but one which led him progressively into the new field of intellectual history, and away from his roots in the modern discipline of economics.
His Riches and Poverty (1996) is a major study of the manner in which Smith’s Wealth of Nations became the canonical text of political economy, and how Malthus can be reconstituted as a “political moralist”. This reorients our understanding of the origins of classical economics in a quite decisive manner, and prepares the ground for a long-overdue reassessment of the work of David Ricardo and John Stuart Mill. Some of the implications of the work he developed in this book are taken up in his more recent Wealth and Life (2009), which includes essays on Mill and the responses to Mill, as well as essays on later Victorian political economy: Mallet, Sidgwick, Foxwell, Marshall and Hobson. He died on 16 June, 2017.
David Laidler (2010)
David Ernest William Laidler, Professor Emeritus at the University of Western Ontario, is one of the most prominent monetary economists of our time and an excellent historian of economic thought. With a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago (1964) and the experience of working for Harry Johnson and Anna Schwartz under the belt, Laidler challenged the Keynesian establishment in the 1960s and 1970s by empirical testing of its tenets concerning the (in)stability of money demand and inflation processes. He rejected, in particular, the then popular cost-push theories of inflation and took a monetarist perspective on price and output fluctuations.
Laidler’s textbook on The Demand for Money – Theories and Evidence (1st ed. 1969, 4th ed. 1993) became standard reading in monetary economics for more than 25 years, because it combined theory with an instructive introduction to the econometric issues and (in later editions, when monetary targetry had failed in many countries) a balanced discussion of stability problems in a changing financial environment.
When the Lucasian postulates of rational expectations and continuously clearing markets began to dominate macroeconomic thinking, Laidler turned against this new establishment, criticizing that it tends to ignore the role that money plays as a buffer stock in coordinating economic activity. In Taking Money Seriously (1990) and numerous other books and articles, he has argued that informational imperfections and price rigidities, which in the current mainstream view are treated as exogenous frictions, can be understood as the outcome of maximizing behaviour in a monetary economy. Holding money enables traders to economize on the time and trouble it takes to transact in markets, and gaps between actual and desired money holdings help to explain much of the price and output dynamics observed in the data.
From early onwards Laidler had considered studies in the history of economic thought as an important part of his work. A large collection of articles, partly reprinted in Macroeconomics in Retrospect (2004), attests to the wide range of monetary topics of the past that he has examined, almost always with an eye to the lessons that they hold for our times. With his monographs on The Golden Age of the Quantity Theory (1991) and Fabricating the Keynesian Revolution (1999), he has fulfilled a long-standing ambition to write a systematic history of the development of monetary macroeconomics from John Stuart Mill and Walter Bagehot down to John Maynard Keynes’s General Theory. The two books show with great clarity and balance the richness of creative conjectures about money, business cycles and unemployment prior to what most modern textbooks present as the origin of macroeconomics.
In addition to his clear and stimulating writing style, Laidler is a gifted speaker and discussant. His reflections of personal experience with fellow economists, policymakers and the tides of time are ‘oral history’ at its best. Anyone who doubts this is referred to the interview that precedes the essays in his honour in David Laidler’s Contributions to Economics (2010).
David Laidler was named a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada in 1982 and served as President of the Canadian Economic Association, 1987-88, and Special Advisor for the Bank of Canada. He is also a Distinguished Fellow of the History of Economics Society.
Ian Steedman (2009)
Ian Steedman, Emeritus Professor of Economics at Manchester Metropolitan University, is a foremost economic theorist and a major historian of economic thought. He has worked in many different fields of economic analysis and has always paid due attention to earlier authors and their contributions. In his 1977 book Marx after Sraffa and in numerous journal papers Steedman put forward a critical appraisal of Marx' s economic doctrine as seen from the viewpoint of Pierro Sraffa's 1960 book. Steedman's book, which was translated into several languages, has triggered a huge literature and is still discussed today. Steedman has published a number of papers and books on the theory of international trade. Together with Stan Metclafe he showed that several theorems of the Hecksher-Ohlin-Samuelson theory of international trade cannot be sustained once heterogeneous capital goods are allowed for. In a number of essays Steedman has dealt with the problem of capital as analysed by major authors such as William Stanley Jevons and Friedrich August Hayek and has shown that their contributions cannot be sustained other than in exceedingly special circumstances. Steedman has also investigated economists' attempts to deal with the concept of time, including Lindahl and Hayek and Arrow, Debreu and Malinvaud. In a book on time and consumption theory Steedman has rediscovered the important contribution of Hermann Heinrich Gossen. All his works, not least his articles on little known economists like Carruthers, are characterized by great erudition, clarity, precision and originality.
Axel Leijonhufvud (2009)
Ever since the publication of "On Keynesian Economics and the Economics of Keynes"(1968) the Swedish-American economist Axel Leijonhufvud has established himself as one of the world's leading macroeconomists. An outstanding contribution which has stimulated controversial discussions until today is his long essay on 'The Wicksell Connection: Variations on a Theme', which forms the cornerstone of his Information and Coordination. Essays in Macroeconomic Theory (OUP 1981). From the very beginning Axel Leijonhufvud made the careful investigation of the history of economic analysis an integral part of his macroeconomic studies. This comes out in a series of influential articles, such as 'Keynes and the Keynesians: A suggested interpretation', 'Keynes and the Classics: Two lectures', 'Say' s Principle: What it means and doesn't mean' and 'The Coordination of Economic Activities: A Keynesian Perspective', jointly written with Bob Clower. Axel Leijonhufvud has always illustrated 'The Uses of the Past' in an erudite, precise and original way not least in his keynote address 'Mr. Keynes and the Moderns' at the first Annual Conference of the European Society for the History of Economic Thought held in Marseilles in February 1997.
Yuichi Shionoya (2007)
Yuichi Shionoya (1932-2015) was Emeritus Professor of Economics and former President of Hitotsubashi University, Tokyo, Japan. In 1986 he was one of the founders of the International Joseph A. Schumpeter Society. He served as the President of the Schumpeter Society from 1990-92 and organized the famous conference in Kyoto in 1992. Yuichi Shionoya has emphasized in his works that Schumpeter understood the essence of the German Historical School (GHS) as comprising a belief in the unity of social life and the inseparable relationship among its components and a concern for development. From these evolutionary and comparative perspectives follow other crucial concepts such as history, ethics, and institutions. Shionoya's contributions focus on Max Weber and Schumpeter as the creative successors of the GHS who developed economic sociology or Sozialoekonomik as a characteristic methodology designed to overcome the controversy on method between Gustav Schmoller and Carl Menger in a synthesis of theory and 'reasoned' history. Professor Shionoya has also emphasized philosophical aspects of economics which may come out best in his Economy and Morality. The Philosophy of the Welfare State (EE 2005). His important works include Schumpeter and the Idea of Social Science: A Metatheoretical Study (CUP 1997), and The Soul of the German Historical School. Methodological Essays on Schmoller, Weber, and Schumpeter (Springer 2005). His most recent publication is Marshall and Schumpeter on Evolution. Economic Sociology of Capitalist Development, co-edited with Tamotsu Nishizawa (EE 2008). Yuichi Shionoya has always integrated economics with other social sciences and aimed for a synthesis of theory with the history of economic thought in an erudite and innovative way. He died on 25 August, 2015.
Giacomo Becattini (2006)
Giacomo Becattini revived the Marshallian concept of industrial district to explain Italy's post-war economic development. His works, from the 1962 book on The Concept of Industry and the Theory of Value onwards, have had a remarkable impact on industrial economics, contributing to the re-establishment of forgotten connections between economics and the other human and social sciences. In the history of economics, Becattini has promoted a new interpretation of Marshall's work, in which the evolution of human character, the growth of knowledge and the nature of territorial and social links play key roles. Emeritus Professor of Political Economy at Florence University, member of the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei, formerly President of the Società Italiana degli Economisti, honorary member of Trinity Hall (Cambridge, UK), in 2002 he received the International Award of the Swedish Foundation for Small Business Research.
Jean Claude Perrot (2006)
Jean-Claude Perrot was trained as an academic historian. He passed his "agrégation" in 1952 and became professor, first in Caen, then in Paris, eventually becoming a full professor at the Sorbonne (emeritus from 1992) and holding other important academic positions. After work on the eighteenth century, notably his monumental thesis The genesis of a modern city: Caen in the XVIIIth century, he worked on the development of statistical methods and institutions in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and became interested in the first Dictionaries on French Political Economy - both novel topics in the French academic landscape of the seventies. He republished Lavoisier's De la Richesse territoriale du royaume de France and went on to develop a new view of eighteenth century French political economy in his An Intellectual History of Political Economy (XVIIth and XVIIIth centuries). Both in content and method this was a very important contribution to the discipline. While investigating the invention and history of statistics in relation to political economy, he became involved in a major editorial task: the new (2005) edition of Quesnay's complete works, with many new texts and an important critical apparatus. For all these reasons, Jean-Claude Perrot magnificently deserves the title of 'Honorary Member' of the European Society for the History of Economic Thought.
Peter Groenewegen (2005)
Peter Groenewegen was one of the most eminent living scholars in the history of economic thought. Beside his pioneering studies on many 18th century authors, he gave also distinguished contributions on the status and role of women in British nineteenth century political economy, and on many authors of the last two centuries. Especially his studies on Turgot, on economic Enlightenment, and his book on Alfred Marshall are milestones in the studies of these subjects. His profound and authoritative knowledge of our discipline ranged through a very large scope of periods and authors.
Paolo Sylos Labini (2005)
Sylos Labini was an eminent scholar of economics always interested in the history of economics. His studies on oligopolistic markets, on development and underdevelopment, and on social classes cannot be really detached from his interests in the Classical school, in the value theory, in the economics of underdevelopment and especially in Adam Smith's thought. Beside giving us a deep insight in these problems, Sylos Labini thought us a scientific approach free from ideologies, independent but also socially engaged. Sylos Labini died on December 7, 2005.
Mark Blaug (2004)
Mark Blaug occupied an outstanding position in the history of economic thought for decades, since his brilliant Economic Thought in Retrospect up to his vast collections of scholarly articles on many important authors and subjects of the past, edited for Edward Elgar. His frequent acute interventions in the living debates also noticeably contributed to the growth of the discipline. Mark Blaug died on 18 November 2011.
Geoffrey C. Harcourt (2004)
Geoffrey C. Harcourt, in many years of research and passionate debates, has constantly given the scholars of our discipline the sense of the close connection between scientific research and social problems, especially in explaining and analysing Cambridge economic theories of the 20th century. While preserving the reciprocal autonomy and the independent rationale of the two fields, Harcourt has taught us that analytical economic insight can be improved through a larger social approach" (see announce of award at Cambridge University web site).
Terence Hutchison (2003)
Terence Hutchison accomplished a series of eminent researches in the history of economic thought. He achieved outstanding positions especially in economic philosophy and methodology, and in studies on the seventeenth and eighteenth century' economic thought. In all these fields his work will remain a milestone for all successive studies. Terence Hutchison died on 6 October 2007
A.W. (Bob) Coats (2003)
A.W. (Bob) Coats was a leading figure in the history of economic thought. His studies range from mercantilism to XX century economics, from methodology to cultural and economic history, to the history of economic analysis. In all these aspects of the discipline he achieved brilliant results, and his approach has become a model for many scholars. He has also inspired and implemented path-breaking researches in the national histories of economic thought. Bob Coats died in April 2007
Mark Perlman (2002)
Professor Mark Perlman was well known as one of the most influential person in the field of Economic though. Mark was born in 1927 in Madison Wisconsin and received his PHD at Columbia University. He was Professor at John Hopkins University from 1956 to 1969 and then at Pittburg University. He was the founding editor of the Journal of Economic litterature and his responsible from 1969 to 1980. He was also one of the founders of the Journal of Evolutionnary Economics and served as an advisory editor. In a long and very rich academic career, he was, in particular, the President of HESS and of several Academic Societies. He published more than 200 papers on various topics, concerning history of economics thought, Labor economics and institutional economics. Among many publications, one can mention the recent Pillars of economics undestanding with C. Mac Cann (the University of Michigan Press). Mark Perlman died on May 3, 2006.
Jacqueline Hecht (2001)
Jacqueline Hecht (1932-2020) had a solid background as a demographer as well as a historian. She spent the larger part of her research career at INED, the French Institute of Demographic Studies, and while there she created, with the support of Alfred Sauvy, who was a professor at the College de France (Paris), a complete department devoted to the history of demography and economics. Her contribution to our understanding of the French economist of the 17th and 18th centuries is impressive. Jacqueline Hecht's main activity appeared as an untiring scientific editor. Among more than twenty publications of the reference series "Classiques de l'économie et de la population" (INED, Paris), one must especially note Pierre de Boisguillebert ou la Naissance de l'Economie Politique, 2 vol. (1966), Johann Peter Süssmilch (1707-1767) L'ordre divin aux origines de la démographie (1979) and particularly François Quesnay et la physiocratie, 2 vol. (1958). The historians of economics owe an immense debt of gratitude to Jacqueline Hecht for her work of translation, comment, diffusion and even discovery of past economists' contributions.
Marjorie Grice-Hutchinson (2001)
After a PhD in economics under the supervision of F.A. Hayek, in 1951, Marjorie Grice Hutchinson, Baronesse Von Schipenchach, devoted her whole academic career to re-evaluating the scholastic contribution to the history of economic thought, and especially to revisit the famous school of Salamanca. She published a lot of first-class articles on this topic. Her books, The School of Salamanca (Oxford,1952) and Early Thought in Spain 1177-1740 (Allen and Unwin, 1978), rapidly became classics in the domain. A Doctor Honoris Causa of the University of Malaga and Madrid, Marjorie Grice Hutchinson was at the same time a major scholar of this period and a subtle economist. She died on 12 April, 2003.