JOURNAL OF INTERDISCIPLINARY HISTORY OF IDEAS 2017 Volume 6 Issue 12 Item 6 – Section 3: Notes – Intellectual History and the History of Economic Thought: A Personal Account by Donald Winch c b a JIHI 2017 Volume 6 Issue 12 Section 1: Editorials 1. Homage to Donald Winch. Philosophy and Geography (M. Albertone, E. Pasini) Section 2: Articles. Special Issue: Philosophy and Geography 2. Introduction: Philosophy and Geography (E.C. Sfer- razza Papa) 3. Incongruent Counterparts. Four Possible Ways of Interac- tion between Geography and Philosophy (M. Tanca) 4. One Sea, One Humanity. Modeling the Man-Sea Rela- tionship in Friedrich Ratzel’s Anthropogeographical Project (C. Santini) 5. L’idée de paysage entre esthétique et géographie (M. Marano) Section 3: Notes 6. Intellectual History and the History of Economic Thought: A Personal Account (D. Winch, with an Introduction by R. Whatmore) Section 4: Reviews 7. Comme des bêtes. Essay Review (C.-O. Doron) 8. Book Reviews (D. Ragnolini, R. Soliani) . Intellectual History and the History of Economic Thought: A Personal Account Donald Winch Donald Winch (1935-2017), a pioneer of intellectual history and one of the incep- tors of the so-called “Sussex school”, gave the following talk at the École Normale Supérieure de Cachan on 21 December 2006. It provides a history of his own en- gagement with the history of economic thought, and his gradual movement from tribe of historians of economics to that of intellectual historians. We present it here in the original form of the ms.; only some punctuation and quotation marks have been regularized, and an URL has been updated. Introduction Donald Winch gave the following talk at the École Normale Supérieure de Cachan on 21 December 2006. It provides a history of his own engagement with the history of economic thought, and his gradual movement from the tribe of historians of economics to that of intellectual historians. One of key points Winch made was that he was fortunate in being able to obtain positions in de- partments of economics despite his historical interests. This changed, of course, during Winch’s career, and the following is a telling commentary by a master of the historical craft. For those who are not aware, Winch was born in 1935, read economics at the LSE and completed his PhD at Princeton in 1960, being supervised by the inspi- rational Jacob Viner, upon whom he comments revealingly here. After a post- doctoral position at Berkeley, for three years, Winch was lecturer in economics Journal of Interdisciplinary History of Ideas 6(2017), 12, p. 6:1–6:18. Non peer-reviewed. at Edinburgh, between 1960 and 1963, before moving to the recently-founded University of Sussex, where he served for over fifty years, becoming Profes- sor of the History of Economics (from 1969) and ultimately Emeritus Professor of Intellectual History (from 2006). Winch’s first book, Classical Political Econ- omy and Colonies, appeared in 1965. It was followed by Economics and Policy: A Historical Study (1969) and (with Susan K. Howson) The Economic Advisory Council, 1930-1939: A Study in Economic Advice during Depression and Recovery in 1976. By this time Winch was recognised as a leading historian of economics. He became a leading intellectual historian through his next book, Adam Smith’s Politics: An Essay in Historiographic Revision (1978). In the 1970s Winch spent time at Princeton University as a visiting fellow, and worked alongside another visitor, Quentin Skinner. It was Skinner, Winch always made clear, who opened his eyes to developments in intellectual history, and who persuaded him to en- gage with Adam Smith’s writings through the interpretative prisms of both classical republicanism and natural jurisprudence. Winch’s work on Smith, af- ter a brilliant introduction to Malthus (1987), was followed up by another classic work, Riches and Poverty: An Intellectual History of Political Economy in Britain, 1750-1834 (1996). The book that Winch mentions in the following personal ac- count was the last he was to publish: Wealth and Life: Essays on the Intellectual History of Political Economy in Britain, 1848-1914 (2009). Winch was meticulous in preparing everything that he wrote for publication, and would have looked askance at publications in his name that appeared posthumously. While this should be born in mind, this piece merits publication, because it gives an in- sight into Winch’s preoccupations having experienced an anti-historical revo- lution in economics, and the growth of intellectual history as a new discipline, which was transforming approaches to traditional subjects across the arts and humanities. Richard Whatmore University of St. Andrews 6 : 2 Donald Winch Intellectual History and the History of Economic Thought: A Personal Account Donald Winch Our deliberations belong to the meta-historical branch of inquiry known as historiography, the principles or practices that either do in fact underpin our branch of historical research and writing, or should do so. As in the related case of the history and methodology of science, analysis and prescription are diffi- cult to separate, though the effort still seems worth making. My subject isthe relationship between the history of economic thought (HET) and intellectual history (IH), and my opinions on this relationship derive from personal experi- ence as an intellectual historian working, at different times, on the borderline between economics, politics, and the moral or social sciences. I stress personal because my historiographic preferences are probably at least as much contin- gent as exemplary, and therefore at best an unreliable guide to how others have behaved or ought to do so. At my age, too, it is no longer safe to assume that the formative influences on my own work are likely to be familiar to anau- dience coming to the subject with newer perspectives and shorter memories. Those who have read the two pieces of work I mentioned to Philippe Fontaine as indications of my position on these matters will know that I have not always been as non-judgemental as I shall try to be on this occasion¹. Like anyone else, when engaged in controversy I have been critical of approaches to HET that I find blinkered. On this occasion I want to make an effort to avoid artificial widening of the schisms between historians of differing persuasion: one histo- rian’s footnotes are often the subject of another’s texts, and vice-versa. ¹ “Adam Smith’s Problems and Ours”, Scottish Journal of Political Economy, 44:4, September 1997, 384-402; and “Does Progress Matter?”, European Journal of the History of Economic Thought, 7:4, Winter 2000, 465-84. Intellectual History and the History of Economic Thought: A Personal Account 6 : 3 I But first we should make sure we are talking about the same thing. Thehisto- ries with which we are chiefly concerned deal with ‘the economic’ in one ofits many guises: theory, policy, doctrines, ideology, and the professional deforma- tion that comes with being an economist. Traditionally, historians of economic thought have engaged in practitioner history; they have been economists writ- ing for the edification or entertainment of fellow economists, a tribe whose historiographic tastes are reasonably uncomplicated. The tribe has chiefly been interested in genealogical questions treated teleologically: how did economics arrive at its present state, where this can either be seen as the latest end point in a triumphant history of modern sophistication or as cause for concern? When that history has been written or inspired by major practitioners – by Marx, Jevons, or Keynes, for example – it has been an offshoot of revisionist discon- tent or intra-professional warfare. At other moments it has been more com- placent and on both kinds of occasion it has inspired the reflections of master- practitioners on the way in which the craft should be practised – a few of which I will cite in a moment. As a pedagogic practice the history of economics was sustained within this practitioner-oriented setting by occupancy of an entrenched role within the curriculum based on the conventional idea that history of the discipline was an effective mode of initiation. Here, of course, lies the main source of thedif- ficulties confronting historians of economic thought: for several decades now they have faced indifference to the history or histories they write from their natural audience, the economists, with the result that their pedagogic role has been eroded, often to the point of extinction, especially in the Anglo-American world. HET seems like the last bastion of ‘literary’ economics, driven into a corner by the advance of mathematics and econometrics, and by the explosion in the number of sub-specialisms which make up the modern division of labour in economics. This state of affairs has prompted many reflections of a pre- or post-mortem kind. My own were given prematurely over four decades ago. I favoured a bid for freedom from a role that entailed meeting the capricious and unhistorical demands of economists. This was linked to a plea for independence along the lines that historians of the natural sciences had already achieved. I was and 6 : 4 Donald Winch remain impressed by what I know of the history of science literature, by the continuity of its concerns and by its standards of scholarship. My concern was mainly with the future of research in HET rather than with its teaching, but in 1962 I had little idea of how academic independence could be acquired by an individual scholar, let alone by a collectivity. My views are, in essence, un- changed, but they were so poorly expressed on that occasion that it would be embarrassing to revive them any further¹. Instead, I would like to call upon some recent mature reflections by a near contemporary, Craufurd Goodwin, in an article on HET that will appear in the updated version of The New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics.