Donald Winch
Stefan Collini
The dogma of market fundamentalism that has swept the Anglo-American world in recent decades likes to claim Adam Smith as its intellectual godfather. But as Donald Winch, who has died aged 82, demonstrated, first in his 1978 book Adam Smith’s Politics and then in subsequent writings, this is an ideological appropriation of Smith’s name which misrepresents his purposes and his achievement.
As Winch convincingly showed, far from recommending unrestricted laissez-faire, The Wealth of Nations analyzed the potentially damaging effects of market relations on civic virtue, emphasizing the ‘mental mutilation’ that factory labour can inflict, and even musing on the politically educative effects of a citizen militia. Smith was not endorsing an unrestrained individualism: rather, he was, along with figures such as his close friend David Hume, exploring the character of ‘commercial society’ as part of a wider enquiry into the nature of law and government in modern states.
Winch’s revisionist account of Smith’s larger intellectual project was typical of the scrupulous, deeply-researched scholarship that led him to be recognized as one of the world’s leading intellectual historians of political economy. Having been educated at LSE and Princeton as an economist, Winch never lost his mastery of even the most technical aspects of economic theory. But he combined this with a subtle, very learned form of intellectual history which re-situated such theories in the thick texture of assumption and debate in which they were originally formed. In this way, he re-shaped our understanding of the part played by economic reasoning in British culture from the late 18th to the mid 20th century, along the way rescuing such figures as Smith, Malthus, Marshall, and Keynes from both their worshippers and their detractors.
Winch grew up in south-west London, the only child of Sidney and Iris, who ran a greengrocer’s shop. After Sutton Grammar School, he went to LSE, graduating with a First in 1956, and then to Princeton to do his PhD, where he came within the ambit of Jacob Viner, one of the leading authorities on the history of economic thought. Winch’s first book, Classical Political Economy and Colonies (1965) already showed him beginning to question the present-minded version of history embedded in orthodox accounts of the development of economics.
After teaching for a year at Berkeley, he returned to the UK, first to a lectureship in economics at Edinburgh, and then in 1963 to the new University of Sussex, an institution with which his life was to be closely bound up thereafter. He became Professor of the History of Economic Thought in 1969, a post he held until his retirement in 2000. Winch possessed the energy and decisiveness, as well as public spirit, to take on major administrative roles, serving as (a very young) Dean of the School of Social Sciences from 1968 to 1974 and as Pro-Vice Chancellor (Arts) from 1986-89. His deeply-felt commitment to what he took to be the informing ideals of academic life together with his combative temperament meant he was not universally loved as a colleague, though no-one could doubt the sincerity and selflessness with which he fought his many battles. His own fearlessness on such occasions made him a formidable champion of fairness and high intellectual standards.
For all his institutional contributions, Winch’s distinction was primarily intellectual. His early work focused on the intersection of the two topics named in the title of his second book, Economics and Policy (1969), which dealt with Keynesian-inspired policy-making in Britain and the USA in the 1930s. But after the great success of Adam Smith’s Politics, he increasingly engaged with a wider range of themes in intellectual history. Common interests and a shared antipathy to the anachronistic, celebratory histories of scholarly disciplines led him to join forces with John Burrow and me to write That Noble Science of Politics: A Study in Nineteenth-Century Intellectual History (1983), a book that was a testament to close friendship as well as intellectual collaboration. For a while, it became common to speak, with some exaggeration, of a ‘Sussex school of intellectual history’.
But his two most substantial (and perhaps long-lasting) books were yet to come, the linked volumes Riches and Poverty: An Intellectual History of Political Economy in Britain, 1750-1834, published in 1996, and Wealth and Life: Essays on the Intellectual History of Political Economy in Britain 1848-1914, in 2009. These volumes displayed his masterly command of the political and intellectual contexts in which various forms of economic theory were articulated and applied. Written with his trademark clarity and penetration, Winch’s detailed work is now the unavoidable reference-point for anyone with a serious interest in understanding the economic thought of these periods.
Though his published writing is measured and precise, Winch was a man of strong attachments and deep feelings, emotions sometimes masked from public view by a cultivated gruffness. As a friend - and he sustained numerous close friendships over many decades - he was wonderfully steadfast and unabashedly partisan, but also enormous fun. To sit up late over the whisky with him was a sure route to ever- greater affection and admiration as well as to a terrible hangover. The object of one of his strongest passions, however, was the magnificent park-like garden of his house in Sussex that he developed with fine aesthetic sense and great practical skill. His responsiveness to nature expressed itself in surprising ways, including, perhaps, in his perception that environmental concerns were central to John Stuart Mill’s social thought.
The quality and influence of Winch’s work was recognised by various honours. He was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 1986, serving as a Vice-President in 1993-4. He held many visiting appointments, including that of Carlyle Lecturer at Oxford in 1995. From 1971 he was also a notably active Publications Secretary of the Royal Economic Society, a role he occupied for, remarkably, 44 years, overseeing several outstanding editions of the collected works of major economists as well as establishing an online database of economists’ archives.
His first marriage, to Marion Steed, ended in divorce; in 1983 he married Dolly Lidster, who survives him, together with his step-son Nicholas.
------Donald Norman Winch, born 15 April 1935, died 12 June 2017