Notes Introduction: The Communist Party Economist 1. Neither Dobb’s letter nor Robertson’s response has survived, but see Amartya Sen, “Autobiography,” http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/economics/ laureates/1998/sen-autobio.html. 2. Michael Ellman, “Review of The Development of Socialist Economic Thought: Selected Essays by Maurice Dobb,” De Economist 157.1 (2009), 123. 3. For a critique of biography as it is conventionally practiced, see Stefan Collini, Common Reading: Critics, Historians, Publics (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 283–98. For defenses of the genre (though not of examples of the kind Collini draws attention to), see David Nasaw, “Historians and Biography: Introduction,” American Historical Review 114.3 (June 2009), 573–8; Jochen Hellbeck, “Galaxy of Black Stars: The Power of Soviet Biography,” American Historical Review 114.3 (June 2009), 615–24; and Alice Kessler-Harris, “Why Biography?,” American Historical Review 114.3 (June 2009), 625–30. On biography and the history of economic thought, see E. Roy Weintraub and Evelyn Forget, eds, Economists’ Lives: Biography and Autobiography in the History of Economics (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007). 4. This is, of course, easier said than done. For contrasting views on the per- ils and promises of synoptic and contextualist analyses, see Dominick LaCapra, Rethinking Intellectual History: Texts, Contexts, Language (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1983), esp. 23–71; and Martin Jay, “Two Cheers for Paraphrase: The Confessions of a Synoptic Intellectual Historian,” Stanford Literature Review 3.1 (Spring 1986), 47–60 and “Historical Explanation and the Event: Reflections on the Limits of Contextualization,” New Literary History 42.4 (Autumn 2011), 557–71. On intellectual history more generally, see Anthony Grafton, “The History of Ideas: Precept and Practice, 1950–2000 and Beyond,” Journal of the History of Ideas 67.1 (January 2006), 1–32. 5. Maurice Dobb, Political Economy and Capitalism: Some Essays in Economic Tradition (London: Routledge, 1937), 338. As will be discussed below, this was not the first time Dobb reached for a Christian vocabulary when dis- cussing his political goals. 6. Michael Ellman, “Review,” 123. 7. The classic example of this narrative is Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Revolution, 1789–1848 (New York: Vintage Books, 1996); The Age of Capital, 1848–1875 (New York: Vintage Books, 1996); and The Age of Empire, 1875–1914 (New York: Vintage Books, 1989). 8. Timothy Blanning, The Pursuit of Glory: The Five Revolutions that Made Modern Europe, 1648–1815 (New York: Penguin Books, 2008), 125–41; Jan Luiten van Zanden, The Long Road to the Industrial Revolution: The European Economy in a Global Perspective, 1000–1800 (Brill: Leiden, 2008); and Jan de Vries, “Economic Growth Before and After the Industrial Revolution: A Modest 225 226 Notes to pp. 3–4 Proposal,” in Early Modern Capitalism: Economic and Social Change in Europe, 1400–1800, ed. Maarten Prak (London: Routledge, 2011), 175–92. 9. Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000) is one of the canoni- cal indictments of Eurocentrism. Christopher Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World, 1780–1914: Global Connections and Comparison (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2004) attempts to write a truly global account of modernity’s ori- gins; for an even more sweeping effort, see André Gunder Frank, ReORIENT: Global Economy in the Asian Age (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998). Jennifer Pitts examines the joined histories of liberalism and empire in A Turn to Empire: The Rise of Imperial Liberalism in Britain and France (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), while David Harvey considers Paris as modernity’s avatar in Paris: Capital of Modernity (London: Routledge, 2006). 10. Which does not imply that these three candidates exhaust the available options. For only one of the many prominent interpretations excluded from this discussion, see Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007). 11. Stephen Kotkin has called this a history of “the welfare state”: Stephen Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 19. Readers of Michel Foucault will recognize Kotkin’s rebranding of governmentality, on which see Michel Foucault Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1977–1978 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007) and Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978–1979 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008). 12. David Graeber, Debt: The First 5,000 Years (Brooklyn: Melville House, 2011), 90. 13. For examples of the social sciences in action, see James Ferguson, The Anti-Politics Machine: ‘Development,’ Depoliticization and Bureaucratic Power, in Lesotho (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); S.M. Amadae, Rationalizing Capitalist Democracy: The Cold War Origins of Rational Choice Liberalism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003); Joseph Morgan Hodge, Triumph of the Expert: Agrarian Doctrines of Development and the Legacies of British Colonialism (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2007); Omnia El Shakry, The Great Social Laboratory: Subjects of Knowledge in Colonial and Postcolonial Egypt (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007); Nick Cullather, The Hungry World: America’s Cold War Battle against Poverty in Asia (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010); Daniel Immerwahr, “Quest for Community: The United States, Community Development, and the World, 1935–1965,” University of California, Berkeley (PhD Dissertation, 2011). For broader reflec- tions on this history, see Theodore Porter, “Speaking Precision to Power: The Modern Political Role of Social Science,” Social Research 73.4 (Winter 2006), 1273–94; James Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998); and Timothy Mitchell, Rule of Experts: Egypt, Techno-politics, Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002). 14. On the prehistory of the nineteenth-century statistical explosion, see Mary Poovey, A History of the Modern Fact: Problems of Knowledge in the Sciences of Wealth and Society (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1998), but also William Deringer, “Calculated Values: A Political History of Economic Numbers in Britain, 1688–1738,” Princeton University (PhD Dissertation, Notes to p. 4 227 2012). On the nineteenth century and after, see Donald Mackenzie, Statistics in Britain, 1865–1930: The Social Construction of Scientific Knowledge (Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press, 1981); Ian Hacking, The Taming of Chance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Theodore Porter, The Rise of Statistical Thinking, 1820–1900 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988) and Trust in Numbers: The Pursuit of Objectivity in Science and Public Life (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995); Stephen Stigler, The History of Statistics: The Measurement of Uncertainty Before 1900 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990); and Adam Tooze, Statistics and the German State: The Making of Modern Economic Knowledge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). 15. For economists’ influence over governance, see A.W. Coats, ed., Economists in Government: An International Comparative Study (Durham: Duke University Press, 1981); Mary Furner and Barry Supple, eds, The State and Economic Knowledge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Michael Lacey and Mary Furner, eds, The State and Social Investigation in Britain and the United States (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993); Dietrich Rueschemeyer and Theda Skocpol, eds, States, Social Knowledge, and the Origins of Modern Social Policies (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996); Michael Bernstein, A Perilous Progress: Economists and Public Purpose in Twentieth-Century America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004); Bradley Bateman, “Keynes and Keynesianism,” in The Cambridge Companion to Keynes, eds Roger Backhouse and Bradley Bateman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 271–90; Marion Fourcade, Economists and Societies: Discipline and Profession in the United States, Britain, and France, 1890s to 1990s (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009); and Keith Tribe, “Liberalism and Neoliberalism in Britain, 1930–1980,” in The Road from Mont Pèlerin: The Making of the Neoliberal Thought Collective, eds Philip Mirowski and Dieter Plehwe (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009), 68–97. 16. Patricia Clavin and Jens-Wilhelm Wessels, “Transnationalism and the League of Nations: Understanding the Work of its Economic and Financial Organisation,” Contemporary European History 14.4 (November 2005), 465– 92; and, more generally, Patricia Clavin, Securing the World Economy: The Reinvention of the League of Nations (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). 17. Jeffry Frieden, Global Capitalism: Its Fall and Rise in the Twentieth Century (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2007), 173–228. 18. On economists in wartime, see Craufurd Goodwin, ed., Economics and National Security: A History of their Interaction (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991); Roger Middleton, Charlatans or Saviours? Economists and the British Economy from Marshall to Meade (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 1998), 85–92; Philip Mirowski, Machine Dreams: Economics Becomes a Cyborg Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); Adam Tooze, The Wages