Historians of Economics and Economic Thought

Steven G Medema, Warren J. Samuels

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2001
• Topic: Business
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134665457
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

The history of economic thought has always attracted some of the brightest minds in the discipline. These chroniclers of development have helped form our current views, and it is no surprise that many among them have been at the forefront of new movements in the history of ideas.This notable collection summarizes the work of these key historians of

1 The skills of freedom

The liberal education of William J. Barber

Bradley W. Bateman*

Freedom, Greek and Roman style

In his famous letter “On Liberal Education,” Seneca condemns the corrupted and useless tradition of liberal education in the Roman Empire in the first century AD. When he surveyed the contemporary (c. AD 60) practice of liberal education, he was repulsed by the degraded and effete instruction offered to the free (liberalis) men of Rome. But while he carefully catalogues the “useless” facts imparted to young, free Romans and attacks liberal education as he finds it, he also carefully constructs an argument for the importance of “true” liberal education.

The conception of liberal education about which Seneca wrote had been first articulated about 400 years earlier in Athens as a means of educating free men for life in a democracy. Many slaves in Athens were educated and used their educations to manage a business, run a bank, or cut a deal for their masters. Some slaves even became wealthy. But the slaves' education was in a skill, or trade. Free men, on the other hand, were believed to need a different kind of education. The liberalibis studiis, for the free men, was certainly a “gentleman's education,” or one designed for a small male elite, but it was not originally understood as an effete, or impractical, education. Quite to the contrary, if they were to be active citizens and leaders, it was crucial that these men be able to analyze a problem, formulate a response, and understand audience psychology. In short, they needed instruction in rhetoric.

Although the term liberal education does not appear in Plato's dialogue Protagoras, the dialogue dates from the same period in Athens and treats the same themes. What is the role of “political–rhetorical skill” in a free Athens? Is it possible to teach these skills? The questions are not idle ones, or for the consideration of idle gentlemen. Athens was surrounded by piranha states, and effective political leadership was the city-state's only hope. Thus, the Greek eleutherioi technai, from which the Latin liberalibis studiis derived, can be translated not only as “liberal arts” but also as “the skills of freedom.” Without the right kind of education in constructing and making good arguments, freedom could not be maintained or defended in the Athens of the fourth century BC or the Rome of the first century AD.

Freedom, American style

Whatever connotations freedom might have had 2,000 years ago in the Roman Empire, where slavery was still an accepted social institution, it is no less problematic today in the United States. Like all terms of approbation, both the left and the right have appropriated it as a normative criterion. Thus, in the literature of the right, “freedom” is a central concept used to denote the liberty of the individual to act unfettered by the state. In the literature of the left, “freedom” is a central concept used to denote the liberation from poverty, ill health, and homelessness. Partisans of the right demand “individual freedom,” while partisans of the left demand “freedom from want.”

Americans hear both of these ideological usages of freedom with some regularity, but the older sense of the word that derives from the Latin liberalis has little currency today. The small liberal arts college is very much alive and well, and plays an important part in American undergraduate education, but the original meaning of the “liberal” in the liberal education has disappeared from popular usage in the postwar years.

There is some irony in this, for until the great boom created by the “New Economy” during the late 1990s, most students in these small, residential colleges spent a good part of their time worrying about whether they would be employable. Their concern about their future employment was largely a result of the peculiar curriculum of the American liberal arts college. The traditional American liberal arts curriculum differs significantly from the university curriculum in most other industrialized nations in its sacrifice of depth for breadth. Whereas in Britain, for instance, an undergraduate studies in only one area for three years, an American undergraduate studying at a liberal arts college would study for four years, but devote only about one-third of his or her course work to the major area of study. Thus, in the United States, an economics major would normally take only about nine or ten courses in the “major” field, out of a total of thirty-two courses over four years. This limited immersion in the major field of study, when combined with the traditional absence of departments in “professional” fields (such as engineering or nursing) from the liberal arts curriculum, means that students at American liberal arts colleges do not have the kind of special training that makes them immediately valuable to employers upon their graduation.

While the students of these liberal arts colleges in the postwar years did not typically understand themselves as pursuing direct training for a career, this was not because they saw themselves as “free” men or women, for whom employment was unimportant. In some cases, they enrolled because they were following family traditions that had begun when their ancestors had enrolled at one of the many small liberal arts colleges that were the most common institutions of higher education in the nineteenth-century United States. In some cases, they enrolled because of church affiliation, since almost all of the American liberal arts colleges were founded as religious institutions and roughly 90 percent of the American population still reports that they have religious faith. In some cases, they enrolled because they wanted to have small classes and work closely with their professors. This latter would have been especially true after the explosion of large state universities in the 1960s, when classes at those universities began to have enrollments of 500 or more. In the end, however, the students in the small colleges planned to find careers that did not differ significantly from those of students attending the large universities. Thus, for the students at a liberal arts college in the postwar years, freedom would have had roughly the same connotations that it had in the larger culture, and these connotations would not have included any special consciousness that the term related to their own educations.

If the students at these schools were unaware of the particular etymology of the liberal education that they pursued, they were, nonetheless, still very much caught up in the older Greek and Roman ideal of pursuing an education that would allow them the perspective from which to consider the fundamental questions of democratic citizenship. The students at these colleges would have to work for a living like any other citizens; but in a world defined by different kinds of democratic institutions, they understood themselves as political agents with a wide range of opportunities for democratic participation, from voting to public advocacy. “Undergraduate concerns are usually very much linked to their perception of issues in the ‘real world’.”¹ And during the postwar years, there was “considerable turbulence in American society that in turn …stimulated noteworthy challenges to the manner in which the academy had become accustomed to going about its business.”² The most familiar of these changes came during the Vietnam War, but those changes were not the only ones.

While students in the postwar years were often effective in pushing for a more “relevant” education, the changes in the liberal arts economic curriculum in the postwar period were driven from both the supply (the professorate) and demand (student) sides. From the professional side, there was a growing concern first with teaching more quantitative courses, and then with introducing more advanced mathematical theory.³ From the student side, there was first pressure to teach more courses in what came to be called development economics, and then later there was pressure for courses in comparative systems and environmental economics.⁴ These changes from the demand side were very much driven by the set of concerns that the liberal arts students brought in their capacities as democratic citizens.

No one has explained these changes in American liberal education better than William J. Barber, in his retrospective essay published in 1997 in Daedalus, the magazine of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Published together with an essay by the Nobel Laureate Robert Solow entitled “How Did Economics Get That Way and What Way Did It Get?” Barber's essay helps to lay out a very clear picture of the difference between the economics education at American liberal arts colleges and at American research universities.⁵ One of Barber's most important distinctions in this regard is between the faculties at these two types of institutions. He characterizes the faculty at large research institutions as “specialists,” while he refers to the faculty at the liberal arts colleges as “general practitioners.” The specialists are those who develop (and train the subsequent generations of those who further develop) mathematical and quantitative “sophistication” in the discipline, while general practitioners are those who teach undergraduates, almost none of whom will ever pursue a Ph.D. in economics. The latter group teaches the students who are not yet sure of their career paths, but who have a concern with questions of critical citizenship. These students are not yet sure whether they will work in business, government, or philanthropy, but they want to be educated about the economic dimensions of the contemporary world.

The desire of these liberal arts students for an education in how to think critically about the economy was quite different from the motivations of the typical students in a graduate program in the postwar era. In the article by Solow accompanying Barber's article, Solow describes economics during the postwar period as a modeling science. The normal work of a theoretical economist in a graduate program during these years would consist of building models based on a very small set of initial assumptions. The skills necessary to build such models were more likely to derive from topology (e.g., fixed point theorems) or engineering (e.g., Kaiman filters) than they were from history or a knowledge of political institutions. This world of the specialist economists became so focused on the internal aesthetics of modeling by the late twentieth century that a survey of graduate students at the leading graduate schools published in 1987 revealed that 68 percent of the respondents believed that “having a thorough knowledge of the economy” was “unimportant” to success in pursuing the Ph.D.⁶ David Colander and Arjo Klamer, the authors of the report containing these findings, concluded:

graduates are well-trained in problem-solving, but it is technical problem-solving which has more to do with formal modeling techniques than with real world problems. To do the problems, little real world knowledge of institutions is needed, and in many cases such knowledge would actually be a hindrance since the simplifying assumptions would be harder to accept.⁷

Thus, the world of the liberal arts students during the second half of the twentieth century could not have been more different from that of the graduate students in American Ph.D. programs. The liberal arts students were interested in studying the economy and the graduate students were interested in studying the intricacies of the models developed by their mentors, with little concern for how those models might connect to the events in the real world.⁸

The free scholar

The perceptive reader will have inferred by this point that many of the Ph.D. economists who taught in liberal arts colleges during the late twentieth century lived between a rock and a hard place. On the one hand, their students pulled them to provide an education in the art of thinking critically about the economy. On the other hand, the specialists in the graduate programs pushed them to keep abreast of theoretical developments that were less and less relevant to thinking critically about the way that economies actually work. Now, it would be difficult to find an economist at a liberal arts college during this period that did not think that the means to teaching students how to think critically about the economy did not consist of teaching them the art of applying economic models to real-world problems; but the models being produced at the research universities were increasingly designed with no idea that they would be relevant to an issue like famine or poverty eradication. Thus, the general practitioner was put in the awkward position of choosing between a decision to develop the kind of institutional knowledge that is necessary to successfully apply models to the world, and the decision to master the latest topological and engineering techniques necessary to stay abreast of the newest cutting-edge theory.

It is typical in the world of the small liberal arts colleges that decision making is decentralized and that the tenured faculty have autonomy over their own careers. This career freedom did not provide the answer to the question of how the general practitioners should focus their professional development, but it did mean that every one of them was forced to make conscious decisions about how to shape their careers. No matter whether they chose to concentrate their teaching efforts in mastering the knowledge of the evolving and emerging institutions, or whether they chose to try to master the ever changing statistical and mathematical techniques developed in the graduate schools, they had to make choices about how best to develop their own ski...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Routledge Studies in the History of Economics
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of contributors
• Introduction
• 1 The skills of freedom: the liberal education of William J. Barber
• 2 Mark Blaug as a historian of economic thought
• 3 Bob Coats and the historicizing of economic policy
• 4 Verve and versatility: Neil De Marchi and the culture of economics
• 5 Maurice Dobb, historical materialism, and economic thought
• 6 The craft of William D. Grampp: historian of economics
• 7 F. A. Hayek as an intellectual historian of economics
• 8 From Adam Smith to John Stuart Mill: Samuel Hollander and the classical economists
• 9 S. Todd Lowry and ancient Greek economic thought: an interpretation
• 10 Ronald Meek and the rehabilitation of surplus economics
• 11 Philip Mirowski as a historian of economic thought
• 12 Donald E. Moggridge as an historian of economic thought
• 13 D. P. O'Brien's contribution to the history of economic analysis
• 14 Joan Robinson's economics: using the history of economic thought as a discovery tool
• 15 Henry William Spiegel: historian of economic thought
• 16 Werner Stark and the sociology of knowledge approach to the history of economics
• 17 Roy Weintraub's contribution to the history of economics
• 18 Donald Winch as intellectual historian
• Index