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Intellectual Communities in the History of Economics Evelyn L Intellectual Communities in the History of Economics Evelyn L. Forget and Craufurd D. Goodwin Ever since its “golden age” (Goodwin 2008), the history of economics has, to a large extent, envisioned itself as a massive collective biography of writers. Notwithstanding our flirtation with various ideas drawn from other fields, this “man and his work” approach still dominates the prob- lems, methods, and sources of scholarship in the field (Augello and Guidi 2009; Dudenhefer 2009; Cardoso 2009; Faucci 2009). Dissatisfaction with that approach has led the authors of the essays in this issue of HOPE to ask whether we might look at intellectual creation from another angle and examine how economists embedded in various kinds of intellectual communities collectively create, promote, and disseminate their ideas. In many ways, this collection seems thirty years overdue. Our focus parallels the shift Michel Foucault created in Enlightenment studies when, in 1979, he challenged scholars to recognize that the very idea of “author- ship” begs analysis in social, political, and cultural context. As a conse- quence of that challenge, historians of the Enlightenment began to exam- ine the economics of printing and literary property, the institutions of Correspondence may be addressed to Evelyn L. Forget, Room S113, Community Health Sci- ences, Faculty of Medicine, University of Manitoba, 750 Bannatyne Avenue, Winnipeg, MB R3E 0W3, Canada (e-mail: [email protected]); or to Craufurd D. Goodwin, Box 90097, Department of Economics, Duke University, Durham, NC 27708-0097 (e-mail: craufurd [email protected]). We are grateful to the Duke Department of Economics for the opportu- nity to explore these issues in a minisymposium held at Duke in November 2008. We thank all of the participants for their generous comments and spirited debate. History of Political Economy 43:1 DOI 10.1215/00182702-2010-042 Copyright 2011 by Duke University Press Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/hope/article-pdf/43/1/1/429363/HOPE431_01Forget_Fpp.pdf by guest on 29 September 2021 2 History of Political Economy 43:1 (2011) censorship and patronage, and the development and evolution of new forms of associational life in the context of the Republic of Letters. Fou- cault’s little essay titled “What Is an Author?” distinguishes between “biog- raphy,” which is the social and historical analysis of a writer’s life, and the “author-function,” which determines the social value of a text. In particu- lar, Foucault argues that the Enlightenment was a key period when a lit- erary text aimed at a general readership (such as a play) first began to be seen as the unique expression of an individual author, while a text in a specialized field of knowledge, such as one of the sciences, was seen instead as a simple statement of truth in such a way that the author became less important than the various institutions that sanctioned and published the work. This distinction makes room in the creation and dissemination of scientific ideas for the collaboration of many individuals who adopt vari- ous and evolving roles in a variety of formal and informal institutions. The impact that Foucault’s essay has had on Enlightenment studies is a little surprising because the actual historical content of that essay has been challenged very effectively by Enlightenment scholars such as Roger Chartier (1994). Historians of science have similarly questioned Foucault’s claim, arguing that scientific writing was not validated by impersonal academies but that the truth-value of a text depended very much on the trust placed in a given author. The imprimatur of the acade- mies did not erase the significance of the author, but rather acknowledged that any author works in a social context. Nonetheless, Foucault’s essay was a very striking rhetorical tool that intentionally undermined Imman- uel Kant’s concept of individual “genius,” which, until then, dominated the way in which intellectual creation was conceived in Enlightenment studies (and, we argue, in the history of economics to this day). Section 1 below examines some of the seminal texts in the history of economics to trace the development of the singular focus in our discipline on the creativity of the gifted individual. Section 2 examines some of the analytical tools, borrowed from other fields, that contributors to this collection found useful in their attempts to more fully portray the collec- tive nature of intellectual creation. In the context of that examination, we juxtaposed two different visions of intellectual community: the “research school approach” borrowed from the history of science and associated with the names of J. B. Morrell and G. L. Geison, and the “collaborative circles approach” borrowed from social psychology and associated with the name of Michael P. Farrell. This juxtaposition yielded a set of distinct hypotheses about the nature of intellectual collaboration. Morrell and Gei- Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/hope/article-pdf/43/1/1/429363/HOPE431_01Forget_Fpp.pdf by guest on 29 September 2021 Forget and Goodwin / Intellectual Communities in Economics 3 son emphasize the role of a charismatic and institutionally powerful leader and the ability of that leader to access and control resources and commu- nications outlets. Farrell, by contrast, argues that innovation is likely to occur not in positions of power but rather at the fringes of a discipline, and emphasizes that the process of leadership is endogenous to group evo- lution and that different leaders emerge at different times to serve differ- ent needs. He notes that the interaction of group members is an exchange between equals rather than an interaction between a charismatic leader and dependent disciples. These two distinct visions are invoked by authors in this collection to describe very different kinds of communities, and one of the purposes of this collection is to gather together the analytical tools that have been used in other disciplines to analyze intellectual collabora- tion in order to determine whether there is any constancy in the ways that collaboration occurs or whether the nature of intellectual collaboration is simply an accident of time, place, and personality. 1. Inattention to Community in the History of Economic Thought The communities dealt with in this issue of HOPE stretch over more than two centuries and two continents, but the authors of the articles conclude that there is a good deal to be learned in the history of economic thought from close examination of the intellectual communities in which econo- mists have often been embedded through time. Some of these communi- ties have been described as “schools” associated with a commanding indi- vidual (e.g., Quesnay and the physiocrats). Others are identified with single universities more than single individuals (e.g., Chicago, Harvard, and Vir- ginia). Some of the communities examined here brought economists into close proximity with artists and intellectuals from other disciplines (e.g., the Vienna circle and Bloomsbury). Still others grew out of a commitment to a certain kind of policy that was widely controversial (e.g., economists in the Office of Economic Opportunity). What distinguishes a “commu- nity” from simply a random collection of individuals with whom econo- mists have interacted is its continuous existence over time and its distinc- tive identity, at least when viewed historically. It is our general hypothesis that these communities can be treated usefully as distinct phenomena when we try to understand the history of economic thought and may be approached using tools from other fields such as the history of science, geography, social psychology, and literary theory. Economists, we find, Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/hope/article-pdf/43/1/1/429363/HOPE431_01Forget_Fpp.pdf by guest on 29 September 2021 4 History of Political Economy 43:1 (2011) are like other people and are affected in complex ways by the social groups of which they are a part. Therefore some of their history must involve the study of these groups in addition to the experience of the individuals. Yet the fact remains that historians of economics until recently have paid remarkably little attention to intellectual communities. The work of Denis O’Brien (1975, 2004) on the classical economists, Malcolm Ruth- erford on the institutionalists, and Philip Mirowski on the economists at RAND stand out as exceptions, as do some major biographies; and a few collections of letters of economists demonstrate nicely their communal activities. But these are slim pickings. We reflect here on some of the pos- sible reasons for this paradox of inattention to “community” in the history of economics. Ironically, historians of economics were quick to appreciate progress in the history, sociology, and philosophy of science a half century ago, and in emulation they prepared studies using the work of Thomas Kuhn, Imre Lakatos, and other philosophers and historians of science. They grasped that there could be approaches to their subject other than the familiar bio- graphical narrative and textual exegesis. They knew about the studies of “big science” covering, in particular, the Manhattan Project and other war work. So why did they not follow these paths for economics? For the most part the history of economics has continued to be presented, espe- cially in textbooks, through the familiar “Lewis and Clark” model wherein lonely and intrepid explorers push out the research frontier, sometimes supported by followers and sometimes impeded by them, but insufficiently engaged with colleagues overall to warrant close attention to them as a community. Why so? Could it be that an explanation for this myopia can be discerned by examining the landmark contributions of our dis- tinguished forebears in what has been called elsewhere “the golden age of the history of economics” (Goodwin 2008)? Were models leaving aside community established perhaps at this earlier time to which later historians came readily to adhere? Seeking answers to these questions we turned to some canonical works from the golden age, roughly the second quarter of the twentieth century.
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