A Companion to the History of Economic Thought - Chapter 35 pot

588 D. E. MOGGRIDGE CHAPTER THIRTY- FIVE Biography and the History of Economics D. E. Moggridge 35.1 INTRODUCTION Biographies of economists are as old as the genre, which dates from Samuel Johnson’s Lives of the Poets, the first four volumes of which appeared in 1779, and James Boswell’s Life of Johnson, which appeared in 1791. One need only think of Dugald Stewart’s Account of the Life and Writings of Adam Smith (1980 [1793]). Economists’ autobiographies date from about the same time – from Hume (1980 [1777]), which is “important historically as one of the first extended accounts by a writer of his literary progress” (Pascal, 1960, p. 15). The flow has continued: in the case of Smith, four members of the editorial team of the Glasgow edition of the Works and Correspondence have contributed to new lives (Campbell and Skinner, 1982; Raphael, 1985; Ross, 1995). Autobiography also continues apace: the Journal of the History of Economic Thought, the organ of the History of Economics Society recently commissioned a number of autobiographical essays, as have the Banca Nazionale del Lavoro Quarterly Review (some of which were collected in book form by Jan Kregel, 1988, 1989) and the American Economist (some of which appear in Szenberg, 1992, 1998), and individual editors have compiled collections (Breit and Spencer, 1986; Heertje, 1993, 1995, 1997, 1999). Still more recently, Roger Backhouse and Roger Middleton have collected together (with additions) the autobiographical introductions to the publisher Edward Elgar’s series “Economists of the Twentieth Century” as Exemplary Economists (2000). There are also collections of “autobiographical” interviews such as Hayek on Hayek (Kresge and Wenar, 1994) and Keith Tribe’s Economic Careers: Eco- nomics and Economists in Britain 1930–1970 (1997). There is also a literature of interviews with practicing economists on the state of particular sub-disciplines (Ibanez, 1999; Snowden and Vane, 1999), or on their development (see the interviews with the founders of cliometrics in the Newsletter of the Cliometric Society, BIOGRAPHY AND THE HISTORY OF ECONOMICS 589 beginning with Lance Davis in July 1990), or on particular historical processes such as Keynes’s coming to America (Colander and Landreth, 1996). Even the Journal of Economic Perspectives is getting in on the act (Krueger, 2000, 2001). In this discussion I will concentrate, with exceptions, on material published since 1990. For a partial list of earlier biographical material, see Moggridge (1989), which excludes autobiographies such as Hoover (1965), Dulles (1980), and the various autobiographical writings of Harry Johnson (Johnson and Johnson, 1978). The years since 1990 have seen two new biographies of Keynes (Moggridge, 1992; Felix, 1999), as well as the completion of Robert Skidelsky’s trilogy (1983, 1992, 2000) – not to mention his Oxford “Past Masters” contribution on the same subject (1996). There have also been biographies of Edwin Cannan (Ebenstein, 1997), John Bates Clark (Henry, 1995), John Maurice Clark (Schute, 1997), Ronald Coase (Medema, 1994), Irving Fisher (Allen, 1993), John Kenneth Galbraith (Stanfield, 1996), Robert Hall (Jones, 1994), Friedrich von Hayek (Ebenstein, 2001), John Hicks (Hamouda, 1993), J. A. Hobson (Schneider, 1996), Nicholas Kaldor (Turner, 1993), John Neville Keynes (Deane, 2001), N. D. Kondratiev (Barnett, 1998), John Law (Murphy, 1997), Alfred Marshall (Groenewegen, 1995), Karl Marx (Wheen, 1999), Gunnar Myrdal (Dostaler, Ethier, and Lepage, 1992), John Nash (Nasar, 1999), Dennis Robertson (Fletcher, 2000), Austin Robinson (Cairncross, 1993), Joseph Schumpeter (Allen, 1991; März, 1991; Swedberg, 1991; Stolper, 1994), G. L. S. Shackle (Ford, 1994), Piero Sraffa (Potier, 1991; Roncaglia, 2000), Thorsten Veblen (Jorgensen and Jorgensen, 1999; Edgell, 2001), and Allyn Young (Blitch, 1995). A biography of Lionel Robbins, whose famous autobiography (1971) is much used for biographies of other economists, is in preparation. There was also Perry Mehrling’s intellectual biography of a group of American monetary economists (1997). There have also been collective volumes on German-speaking émigré economists after 1933 (Hagemann, 1997), Adam Smith’s Daughters (Polkinghorn and Thomson, 1998), “neglected” northwest European economists (Samuels, 1998), and Italian economists (Meacci, 1998), and biographical dictionaries of women economists (Dimand, Dimand, and Forget, 2000) and dissenting economists (Arestis and Sawyer, 1992; Holt and Pressman, 1998). In the realm of autobiography, as well as the contributions to the two journals and collective volumes mentioned above, and mixed collections of memoir and autobiography such as Coase (1994) and Harcourt (2001), there have also been volume-length accounts by James Buchanan (1992), Alec Cairncross (1999), S. Herbert Frankel (1992), Milton and Rose Friedman (1998), Benjamin Higgins (1992), Charles Kindleberger (1991), Raymond Mikesell (2000), and Franco Modigliani (2001), as well as substantial, autobiographical commentaries in I. M. D. Little’s collection of his previously published papers (1999). Economists’ biographies and autobiographies have become sufficiently common for novelists, who often use the construction of a biography as the core of their plot (see, e.g., Byatt, 1990, 2000), to remark on the phenomenon. Chick, the narrator of Saul Bellow’s Ravelstein (2000), is engaged in a study of John Maynard Keynes and fascinated by his memoir of “Melchior” (Keynes, 1949). Character- istically, perhaps, Bellow takes liberties (p. 8) with the story of Lloyd George and the French Minister of Finance, Louis-Lucien Klotz. 590 D. E. MOGGRIDGE The relation between biography and the history of economic thought has gen- erated a small literature (Jaffé, 1965; Stigler, 1982c [1976]; Walker, 1983a, 1983b (ed.); Breit, 1987; Moggridge, 1989). [Denis O’Brien (2000) has a section entitled “biography” but it is predominantly about editing economists.] With autobiography, there is no such literature: we are limited to editorial introductions such as Tribe (1997) and Backhouse and Middleton (2000). At least initially, I shall consider the two genres separately. 35.2 ECONOMISTS’ BIOGRAPHERS ON THE ROLE OF BIOGRAPHY In the many biographies, even those published during the past decade, there is little mention of this literature, the exceptions being Moggridge (1992, pp. xvi– xxvi) and Groenewegen (1995, p. xii). This is not surprising, as biography stands on its own as a genre – one with its own scholarly infrastructure, including the journal Biography, which is now in its 24th year. With economists, there are number of possible justifications for the exercise. One is “nobody has ever written a full biography of the man” – the justification used, for example, by Patricia James – possibly with a subsidiary task of setting the record straight (James, 1979, p. 1). This is the primary justification used by Peter Groenewegen (1995, p. xii), to which he added his subject’s relevance to general Victorian intellectual and social history (ibid., p. 2). A similar justification is used for Robert Hall, most of whose career was in Whitehall: “His character and achievements are not widely known. This memoir is designed to tell more people about him” (Jones, 1994, p. 1). There is the related justification “here was an interesting man who lived at an interesting time” (Weatherall, 1976, p. v). Another justification, ignoring Stigler (see below) is that “By knowing a thinker’s life and times better, one may obtain a greater insight into his thought” (Ebenstein, 2001, p. 1). This echoes Roy Harrod’s view of Keynes, that “an understanding of the background to his thought is indispensable for a correct interpretation of his conclusions” (1951, p. v). Or, as Ian Simpson Ross put it more carefully with Adam Smith (1995, p. xvii), “Plausible reconstruction of the meaning of Smith’s discourses from an historical standpoint can be helpfully contextualised by the life story.” There may also be a similar logic of justification in Harrod’s The Life of John Maynard Keynes, written within a few years of its subject’s death: I cannot conceive how a future student, however conscientious and able, who had first hand knowledge neither of Keynes nor of the intellectual circles which formed his environment could fail to fall into grievous errors of interpretation. (1951, p. v) This comment displays remarkable contempt for the craft of the professional historian. There is also what Robert Skidelsky, in his “review of reviews” of the English edition of the first volume of his Keynes trilogy, which included a Stigleresque review by Maurice Peston, called “the itch to explain” (1985, p. xvii). There may be a disciplinary agenda, as revealed in Robert Skidelsky’s last substantive sentence in his introduction to the third volume of his trilogy: BIOGRAPHY AND THE HISTORY OF ECONOMICS 591 If this biography has rescued Keynes from the economists, and placed him in the world of history where it properly belongs, it will have achieved its aim. (2000, p. xxii). Given Harrod’s claim quoted above, it might be a plausible aim. However as his immediate predecessor (Felix, 1999), cited once to correct one error (2000, p. 11n), was a professional historian, and as the biographer before that (Moggridge, 1992) was an historian of economics, the claim is forced. It is clear (e.g., 1983, pp. xv– xxii; 2000, pp. 491–8) that Skidelsky has a “thing” about Harrod. In addition to “the conviction that the life and work of this great social scientist instructs us in the working of the human mind and the ways of the human spirit,” there is an explanatory purpose in Robert Allen’s biography of Joseph Schumpeter that “It . . . informs us of how progress in the analysis of society and the economy takes place” (1991, p. xix). Finally, there is what one might call the moral purpose, clearest perhaps with the Victorians, such as Leslie Stephen, who in his biography of Henry Fawcett, after mentioning several memorials to his subject, continued as follows: Such monuments are but outward symbols of the living influence still exercised upon the hearts of his countrymen by a character equally remarkable for masculine independence and generous sympathy. My sole aim has been to do something towards enabling my readers to bring that influence to bear upon themselves. (1885, p. 468) Thus we have a story to tell and something to explain or illuminate. In many cases, the interests of the biographer extend well beyond the discipline. Indeed, in some cases, such as Alan Ebenstein’s recent biography of Hayek (Ebenstein, 2001), it could be argued that the last thing to interest the author is economics! The volume provides no indication of how Hayek as an economist was able to win a Nobel Prize for economics. The volume has even led at least one reader to raise the question as to how historians of economics should treat nonhistorians’ biographies. The simple answer is “with care.” One can think of wonderfully useful contributions to the history of economics by noneconomists; in the case of Keynes, for example, the work of Peter Clarke (1988) and Warren Young (1987). On the other hand, one can think of the case of Robert Skidelsky, where the treatments of both Keynes’s own ideas and of other elements of the history of thought leave something to be desired (Laidler, 2002). 35.3 BIOGRAPHY AND THE HISTORY OF ECONOMICS: THE LITERATURE The conversation on the relation between biography and the history of economic thought began with William Jaffé (1965) attacking the view that some “historians of our science think that it a virtue to overlook . . . [biographical material] as if the personal aspects of it were a contaminating substance about which the less said the better” (p. 224). He attempted to make a case, with examples from his 592 D. E. MOGGRIDGE work on Walras, “for the importance of biography in the understanding of analysis” (p. 226). He reported that the notion that biographical material might be useful had first occurred to him after he found the letters and papers in Memorials of Alfred Marshall (Pigou, 1926) helpful in understanding the Principles. Its full implications came to him during his long studies of Walras, when “it gradually dawned on me that his general equilibrium theory must be understood as a work of art, and that, like all works of art, it was marked with the personality of its creator” (Jaffé, 1965, p. 226). And he was prepared to argue: What is true of Walras’ contribution is equally true of all the great innovations in our science, whether it be that of Adam Smith, Malthus or Ricardo, that of Cournot, Pareto or Marshall, or that of John Maynard Keynes. . . . Consequently we must miss some essential trait of an argument, or of a theory, or of a description in economics, if we ignore the distinctive individuality of its author. (pp. 226–7) He stressed that he was talking of “the fundamental individual discoveries which from time to time modify the corpus [of economic science] in some essential way and give it a new aspect” (p. 227). After emphasizing the importance of evidence such as oral traditions, the opinions of others, and notes and jottings in the economist’s own papers, he proceeded to his examples from Walras. All of these related either to the genesis of particular Walrasian ideas in the work of Louis Poinsot, Achille-Nicolas Isnard, Paul Picard, and Herman Amstein, or to “the influences and circumstances that led him to devote himself to purely theoretical pursuits” (p. 230). Jaffé’s plea for the use of biography met with a reaction. George Stigler, an avid consumer of biographies, had little to say about Jaffé’s arguments. Stigler did not confront Jaffé’s examples: the targets of his rhetorical scorn – “The hand picked example, the implicit absurdity, the abhorrence of evidence” (Stigler, 1982c [1976], p. 86) – were all authors dealing with J. S. Mill. Stigler did not discuss the genesis of economic ideas. But he argued that if “science consists of the arguments and evidence that lead other men to accept or reject scientific views,” then: Science is a social enterprise, and those parts of a man’s life which do not affect the relationship between that man and his fellow scientists are strictly extra-scientific. When we are told that we must understand a man’s life to understand what he really meant, we are being invited to abandon science. . . . The recipients of a scientific message are the people who determine what the message is, and no flight of genius which does not reach the recipients will ever reach and affect the science. (1982c [1976], p. 91) In other words, Stigler did not believe that biographical information – or at least very much biographical information – played a role if one was concerned with “the scientific role these men played in the evolution of economic theory: that role was played with the words they wrote, not with the ideas they intended to express” (p. 92). Biographical information might help in the study of the sociology of the discipline, but that was another matter. This view, Stigler acknowledged (1982c [1976], p. 92) was characteristic of the physical sciences. BIOGRAPHY AND THE HISTORY OF ECONOMICS 593 In later unpublished papers reported on by Walker (1983a, pp. 43–7; 1983b (ed.), pp. 2–3), Jaffé made his views more explicit. He saw three roles for biographical information: helping to explain the genesis of ideas; helping to eluci- date the meaning the author wished to convey (what others have called the “vision”); and assisting in the process of acceptance of a theory (the activities of the economic scientist directed toward the dissemination or acceptance of his theories). Donald Walker then entered the conversation (1983), with a taxonomy of the ways in which biography – or, more accurately, different types of biographical information (personal, professional, and bibliographic) – could be used for the history of economic thought. He accepted Stigler’s views as to how economics worked. (This meant that the reinterpretation of an economist’s work using material not available to all – or at least some – contemporaries represented a separate, later item from the one originally created.) Developing and filling in his taxonomy, he suggested that for modern economists (“who wrote since 1770”) it was “ordinarily not necessary to have biographical information to establish the meaning of theories” (p. 55). The main argument here was that “we already know the meaning of the specific words and terms and techniques that . . . [the economist] used or can establish it from the context of his writing” (p. 55) – a position that many economist–intellectual historians, such as Donald Winch (1976, 1996), would dispute. Walker claimed to be unable to find a single example of where the sort of environmental information provided by a biography had helped to establish an author’s meaning, although he was prepared to accept that it might be the case with someone. Similarly, he suggested that such information was unnecessary for an account of the intellectual evolution of economics as a discipline. Rather, he followed Stigler in suggesting that the major role of biographical information lay in its assisting our understanding of the sociology of the subject. He allowed such information a subsidiary role in the study of the genesis of an author’s ideas, but even here he was inclined, despite Jaffé’s papers on Walras which he had just edited (Walker, 1983b (ed.)), to believe that the possibilities were limited. His problem with Jaffé in the single case that he discussed was that the evidence was “circumstantial” (1983b (ed.), p. 52). This does not, however, destroy its value as evidence. Difficulties, he suggested, arose from an absence of information and the fact that investiga- tions into the process of creation of new ideas were “more like psychology than a study of the evolution of economic thought” (1983b (ed.), p. 52) – that is, difficult. Other than my own, there has been one other discussion of biography and the history of economics, William Breit’s “Biography and the making of economic worlds” (1987). Breit saw three possible roles for biography in the study of the history of economics; heuristic, therapeutic, and scientific. The first two – the stimulation of interest in the subject and the guiding of further investiga- tion (p. 824) and “the lessons learned about the life-styles and work-habits of scholars” (p. 825) – were unimportant, except, perhaps, in the classroom. The third arose from Breit’s view of economics and other social sciences as not being dominated by single paradigms at any particular time. Rather: 594 D. E. MOGGRIDGE economic science . . . proceeds by the formation of enclaves of consensus and these competing enclaves exist side-by-side, each governed by its unique and individual world-view. These enclaves are what we perceive as schools of thought, or what I would prefer to call “interpretive communities.” (p. 827) He turned to the consensual glue that holds these communities together and found it in a suggestion of George Stigler’s (1982a [1969], p. 116): A school within a science is a collection of affiliated scientists who display a con- siderable higher degree of agreement upon a particular set of views than the science as a whole displays. It is essential to a school that there be many scientists outside it, or the school would have no one with which to argue. A school must have a leader, because the consensus of its members will normally be achieved and maintained by major scientific entrepreneurs. In some instances, such as the Ricardian school, the chief bond has, in fact, been admiration for the leader. I doubt whether a scientific school based upon substantive scientific views can long survive the death of its leader, except in the improbable event of the appearance of a new leader of comparable stature. New analytical and empirical challenges will continue to emerge and only a strong leader can provide generally acceptable responses to these challenges. According to Breit, understanding the process by which such entrepreneurial or charismatic leaders emerge required the use of biographical data. In “economics the proper analogy is not so much science as art and the role of the historian of economics is much closer to that of the art historian than to the historian of science” (1987, p. 829). Exactly what difference that made to the use of biographical material in the history of economics was not elaborated on. Breit proceeded to provide an illustration of how biographical material can illuminate the process though which successful scientific entrepreneurs create schools or worlds, taking the example of Ricardo replacing Malthus as the dom- inant figure in English economics. To do so, he latched onto Keynes’s conjecture in The General Theory as to the reasons for Ricardo’s success (Keynes, 1973a [1936], pp. 32–3): It must have been due to a complex of suitabilities in the doctrine to the environment into which it was projected. That it reached conclusions quite different from what the ordinary uninstructed person would expect, added, I suppose, to its intellectual prestige. That its teaching, translated into practice, was austere and often unpalatable, lent it virtue. That it was adapted to carry a vast and consistent logical superstructure gave it beauty. Thus there is a disjuncture between the reasons biographers of economists give for their enterprises and the literature on the uses of biographical materials about economists in the history of economics. Nonetheless, I think that the discussion of the uses of biographical material can be moved a little further, taking yet another cue from Stigler. BIOGRAPHY AND THE HISTORY OF ECONOMICS 595 35.4 FURTHER CONSIDERATIONS In his autobiography, Memoirs of an Unregulated Economist (1988), although Stigler admitted that he “cannot be confident that it would be profitable for a young scholar to study the history of the subject,” especially if that scholar was likely to be an innovator (pp. 215, 216), he made a powerful case for the history of economic thought as both a humane and a scientific enterprise. He accepted that personal knowledge is an advantage in understanding an economist’s ideas. Inevitably, he had to accept that one “surprising feature taught by intellectual history is the persistence of uncertainty as to what a person really meant” (p. 216). It is the existence of this uncertainty that earlier in the book led him, in his discussion of the advantages, not only for students but for the professorate, of concentrating work at the frontiers of the subject in a limited number of departments, that, over and above the stimulation of very able colleagues and the earlier discovery of error, was the advantage of easy communications. He continued (pp. 36–7): Even though Jones and I have always spoken English and may even have gone to the same graduate school, each of us thinks somewhat differently; we each have a different order in which we think and probably a different pace in expressing ideas. Family members use words which have special meanings for them. . . . So it is with every person, and that is why intimate association makes communication between people efficient and accurate. If I had known David Ricardo, I would be better able to understand his written words. That would be a help, because to this day the meanings of this theories are much debated. Even with the conception of the discipline as a box of tools, this moves the discussion forward. The fact that economists were writing for their fellow pro- fessionals (more and more so as the discipline became “professionalized”) and were subject to certain rules of the game, does not mean that the products of their pen were anonymous “economese.” Anyone who has read pieces by Maynard Keynes, Dennis Robertson, Ralph Hawtrey, and A. C. Pigou and was presented another example with the name removed would almost certainly know to whom it belonged. There was a distinctive style, at least initially. The style disappeared as “time, experience and the collaboration of a number of minds” found the “best way” of expressing the ideas (Keynes, 1937, p. 111) and ideas were, in David Laidler’s (1999) phrase, “fabricated” for incorporation into the general body of run-of-the-mill economics. The initial style as such is important. It encapsulated not only the formal elements of the author’s theory but, particularly when the ideas appeared in book form, an associated bundle of intuitions and hunches. As Keynes repeatedly emphasized – from early papers for Cambridge discussion societies through his 1924 memoir of Marshall to his posthumously published 1942 lecture “Newton the man” – at the center of the act of creation is an intuition or insight that allows the scientist to “see through the obscurity of the argument or of the apparently unrelated data,” as a result of which “the details will quickly fall into a scheme 596 D. E. MOGGRIDGE of arrangement, between each part of which there is a real connection” (Keynes, 1909, p. 5). Then comes the problem of formalization and tidying up. But the intuition came first and normally ran ahead of the formal analysis. The original text will carry the mixture. This is important for two reasons: (i) the factual historical one that this was the package originally presented to the profession which, perhaps with supplementary supporting papers, persuaded it that there was something to “fabricate”; and (ii) the inevitable fact that whenever two historians of economics dispute the meaning of X’s thought they are forced back to the original text, with its mixture of formalism and intuition – of fully and less fully worked out ideas. In these circumstances, in the absence of personal contact, it would seem folly not to make what use one can of the alternative supplements to scientific publications – personal knowledge in the case of the living, or, in the case of the dead, the raw materials of biography, perhaps even mediated by a biographer. Biographical materials or the biography may, with luck, for the historian of economics produce the equivalent of Stigler’s desire to have Ricardo as a colleague. Of course the biographer cannot reproduce the inner world or his of her subject. But, after seeing his or her subject’s mind operate on occasion after occasion, the biographer is able to describe or illuminate its workings more completely. That may be of some use to the historian of analysis. These are certainly good grounds for making efficient use of biographical information. At this point, I should discuss one other source of biographical information – the biographical memoir. For British economists the best, long-standing source of these is the Proceedings of the British Academy. The Economic Journal followed its American counterparts in the 1980s and early 1990s in eschewing such material. One of the victims of this change in practice was George Stigler. In the 1990s the EJ revived the economist’s obituary, briefly with a defined editor. There are also dictionaries of national biography. Twenty-four volumes of a new American National Biography appeared in 1999. A New DNB is to replace the Dictionary of National Biography in the UK in 2004, with essays recast or revised as necessary. The reworking allows the inclusion of new material and the treating of the subject in a less respectful manner than was formerly the case, particularly when volumes were dealing with the recently deceased. The new material will also have the advantage of being (a) machine readable and search- able and (b) having supporting supplementary biographical information available in a standardized format – a boon for both synthetic and comparative studies of the profession. Among the stock of EJ biographies are Keynes’s memoir of Marshall (1924), which Schumpeter regarded as “the most brilliant life of a man of science I have ever read” (1946, p. 503, n. 12) – a piece that Ronald Coase has demonstrated (1984, 1990) also shows the extent to which the dead can influence their biographical treatment – Austin Robinson’s memoir of Keynes (Robinson, 1947), and Henry Phelps Brown’s memoir of Roy Harrod (Brown, 1980). Phelps Brown also wrote Harrod’s memoir for the British Academy (1979) – in a series that includes other notable memoirs, such as R. D. C. Black’s Ralph George Hawtrey (Black, 1977) and James Tobin’s Harry Gordon Johnson (Tobin, 1978). BIOGRAPHY AND THE HISTORY OF ECONOMICS 597 35.5 AUTOBIOGRAPHY Thus far, I have only discussed biographies. Given their status as raw material for biographers and others and their recent efflorescence, autobiographies also merit attention. At the heart of any autobiography is the memory of the subject, supplemented by other external evidence. Given the importance of memory in many walks of life and the consequences of memory loss, psychologists and others have been concerned with its characteristics for decades. In the 1920s, F. C. Bartlett conducted a number of experiments, which included the use of a North American native folk-tale, “The war of the ghosts,” adapted from a transla- tion by Franz Boas. Bartlett’s conclusions were of some interest: 1. It appears that accuracy of reproduction, in a literal sense, is the rare exception . . . 2. In a chain of reproductions obtained from a single individual, the general form or outline is remarkably persistent . . . 4. With frequent reproduction the form and items of remembered detail very quickly become strengthened and thereafter suffer little change. 5. With infrequent reproduction, omission of detail, simplification of events and structure, and transformation of items into more familiar detail may go on almost indefinitely, or so long as unaided recall is possible. 6. . . . [I]n long-distance remembering, elaboration becomes more common in some cases; and there may be increasing importation, or invention . . . 8. Detail is outstanding when it fits in with a subject’s pre-formed interests and tendencies. It is then remembered, though often transformed and it tends to take a progressively earlier place in successive reproductions . . . 10. In all successive rememberings, rationalisation, the reduction of material to a form which can be readily and “satisfyingly” dealt with is very prominent. (Bartlett, 1932, pp. 93–4) More recent studies of autobiographical memory suggest that the accuracy of memories is highest for lists of words – as the memory has to deal with more complex situations, it becomes less accurate. Autobiographical memories are constructed out of various components, and final construction will be “guided by the person’s goals at the time of retrieval, as well as by the goals at the time of encoding [the components, so that] changes in what is remembered should be expected” (Rubin, 1996, p. 4). Such memories are not always accurate, but perhaps because of the presence of specific details, individuals may believe that the remembered event occurred even in cases where there is independent evidence that it did not (ibid., p. 5). High degrees of emotional stress increase recall, while depression leads to the recall of general, rather than specific, events (ibid., p. 10). Autobiographical memories are constructed and maintained by a central process in the working memory. It would appear that such memories are put together from the autobiographical knowledge stored in the long-term memory. The knowledge is itself indexed by “personally meaningful and self-relevant themes” (Conway, 1996, p. 72). Such themes, central to psychoanalysis, may be period [...]... in the Journal of the History of Economic Thought or the Newsletter of the Cliometric Society may also prove useful to historians of sub-disciplines in economics This brings me back to the uses of biography in the history of economic thought It can perform the same sociological functions as autobiography, as a possible supplement to the possibilities of understanding the development of economic analysis... important part of the process (Sayers, 1956, pp 2–3) Keynes’s failure to persuade, and the accompanying professional disarray in the case of A Treatise on Money and the related policy package in the Macmillan Committee and the Economic Advisory Council, played an important part in his lack of success in 1930–1 (Howson and Winch, 1977, pp 46–81; Clarke, 1988, chs 4–7) Professional disarray also reduced the. .. likely to be fairly accurate if only because if autobiographical memory exists to provide some record of past selves, one needs records of relevant episodes such as the attainment of particular goals Such is the state of memory, which may be supplemented by external evidence These elements are combined in the process of creating an autobiography Autobiography is the past seen from the present and “later... and Middleton (2000), the interviews undertaken by Tribe (1997), and the uncollected essays in the Banca Nazionale del Lavoro Quarterly Review, the American Economist, and the Journal of the History of Economic Thought, there are 198 essays Of these, 30 represent cases in which the authors concerned made two – or, in five cases, three – autobiographical contributions The existence of this growing stock... useful to have Ricardo as a colleague? Given that he could not, perhaps the role of biographical materials in the history of economics is more important than many have been prepared to allow BIOGRAPHY AND THE HISTORY OF ECONOMICS 601 Bibliography Allen, R L 1991: Opening Doors: The Life and Work of Joseph Schumpeter, 2 vols New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction —— 1993: Irving Fisher: A Biography Cambridge, MA:... that I have already discussed However, economists do not just develop pieces of analysis for reasons internal to the profession and then try, with varying 600 D E MOGGRIDGE degrees of success, to sell them to their professional colleagues Economists have also attempted to change the world Here, changing analysis and persuading one’s colleagues is an important part of the process, but there is also the. .. experience will sift the past and determine what was important and worth talking about from what merely seemed important then” (Pascal, 1960, p 69) The perspective is important, as is the fact that autobiography relates not facts “but experiences – i.e the interaction of a man and facts or events By experience we mean something with meaning and there can be many varieties and shades of meaning” (ibid., p... himself and the outside world that is of importance to our present concerns No matter what the avowed purpose of the exercise is, autobiography is a kind of apologetics” (Gusdorf, 1980, p 39) Lionel Robbins’s Autobiography of an Economist (1971) is a good example: In the final analysis the prerogative of the autobiography consists in this: that it shows us not the objective stages of a career – to discern... stock of autobiographical memoirs can play a useful role in the history of economics In particular, given the absence of manuscript records in many universities in the UK (and probably elsewhere), such memoirs may prove prime supplements to university calendars in tracing the development of particular departments though much of the postwar period (Tribe, 1997, pp 5–6) Their value will increase as the stock... the matter of persuading others – public servants, politicians, and the general public What is possible, even in economic matters, is a matter of persuasion And there are good examples of such exercises in the biographical literature, such as Skidelsky on Keynes on prewar finance or the campaign surrounding How to Pay for the War (Skidelsky, 2000) Professional persuasion, and consensus, was an important . closer to that of the art historian than to the historian of science” (1987, p. 829). Exactly what difference that made to the use of biographical material in the history of economics was not elaborated. Raphael, 1985; Ross, 1995). Autobiography also continues apace: the Journal of the History of Economic Thought, the organ of the History of Economics Society recently commissioned a number of. readable and search- able and (b) having supporting supplementary biographical information available in a standardized format – a boon for both synthetic and comparative studies of the profession.

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