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Constructing Economic Science

Constructing Economic Science

The Invention of a Discipline 1850–1950

Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and certain other countries.

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© Oxford University Press 2022

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Printed by Integrated Books International, United States of America

II.

PART III. ALTERNATIVE HISTORIES

PART IV. COMMERCE AND ECONOMICS

Acknowledgements

During the very long time that I have worked on this book I have benefited from many sources of financial support that made possible the initiation of the project, and eventually its completion. I began serious work with the aid of an Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) grant for the academic year 1988–1989, at the end of which the project had expanded considerably and I was very much further from finishing it than I had been when I started. I subsequently received assistance from the Nuffield Foundation that enabled me to continue travelling to libraries and accumulating material, while the ESRC also financed study visits to Germany and France. A Hallsworth Fellowship from Manchester University meant that I was able to devote the entire academic year 1992–1993 to research, during which I extended the period of study up to the 1960s and planned a series of interviews with academics who would be able to throw light on the development of departments and careers during the postwar period.1 The British Academy provided funds for the initial batch of 25 interviews, subsequent interviews being supported by my own department at Keele. The Leverhulme Foundation gave me a Research Fellowship for half of the academic year 1997–1998, which together with leave from Keele University enabled me to spend the academic year 1997–1998 completing a number of papers, only one of which, on the Cambridge Tripos, was directly related to this project. Many years later, the project has been terminated with the writing of this book, for which I have been supported since March 2019 by an Estonian Research Council Grant [PRG 318].

While I had from the beginning thought in terms of a major monograph on the development of economics as an institutional creation, it proved difficult to find a publisher that could see much merit in the idea. Added to this, the progressive restructuring of British higher education during the 1990s brought with it a very particular frustration: the more that I learned about the history of British universities, the more I realised that those who were currently arguing for reform and change had very little understanding, historical or otherwise, of the institutions they were actively reorganising. This remains true today. Disenchanted and dismayed with what was being done to British universities, I left the system in my early fifties, abandoned the ambition of pulling all the material I had written into a coherent story, and the book project was shelved. I eventually formulated a new project related to work on the language of political economy, spending two months at the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study (SCAS), Uppsala, in the autumn of 2012 as guest of the Principal, Björn Wittrock. I wrote up more material for this book during 2013 and 2014, completing a manuscript that Scott Parris at Oxford University Press in New York took up, and which was published in 2015 as Economy of the Word. The efficiency and engagement with which Scott and his assistant editor Cathryn Vaulman oversaw final

1 A total of 35 interviews was completed, and an edited selection published under the title Economic Careers in 1997.

revision and production of this book, coupled with the encouragement of the series editor, Steve Medema, revived my interest in writing books, and so once Economy of the Word was published, my thoughts turned back to the project I had abandoned. Both Steve and Scott were very supportive, and in the spring of 2016 Oxford University Press gave me a contract for this book. Since the retirement of Scott and Cathryn Vaulman’s departure, James Cook and Macey Fairchild have been as helpful and responsive as were Scott and Cathryn.

My next problem was organising the mass of material that I had collected over 30 years. I began working on a Toshiba laptop in 1988 and so the great majority of the notes and data connected with this project is digital. Digital cameras and smartphones, on the other hand, postdate my archival and library research, from which I had accumulated very many boxes and files of photocopies. My organisational problem was not only conceptual, but also very physical. However, shortly after Oxford University Press gave me a contract, the referendum on British membership of the European Union was held. The narrow majority in favour of departure immediately set me thinking of ways to mitigate the damage that Britain’s secession from the European Union would do to my future work and the lives of my family; the morning after the referendum I decided to apply for a fellowship at SCAS. This would not only give me the focus I needed to complete the book; it would also give me the physical space and library resources that completion demanded. I was fortunate to be granted a Professorial Fellowship for 2017–2018, enabling me to begin concluding a project initiated 35 years before, in joint work with Istvan Hont.

At SCAS I had once again an ideal environment for thinking and writing. Besides the challenge represented by the mass of material that I had collected, I had never entirely resolved the problem of writing a coherent historical monograph that accounted for the emergence of the discipline of economics, and for the shape that it subsequently took. There were so many overlapping chronologies in different institutions, careers, and countries that it was difficult to convey the Gleichzeitigkeit des Ungleichzeitigen. Presenting an account of the Cambridge Moral Sciences Tripos to a SCAS seminar in September 2017 gave me the thread that I needed for the book; and then in March 2018, presenting the work of William Ashley to the economic historians at the University of Uppsala helped me shape two of its central chapters. Needless to say, over the years I have also presented material from this book in very many different contexts, and I am grateful for all the help and criticism that I have received.

More chastening during my time at SCAS was the realisation of just how much time I had devoted to collecting material that I would never be able to use; and how the clarity with which, over 20 years ago, I had mastered details of careers and institutions has now faded. On the other hand, historical understanding of the path taken by modern economics seems barely to have shifted from a very rudimentary story in 40 years; I encounter many of the same generalisations and misunderstandings in recent commentary on institutions and ideas that set me off on my work in the first place all those years ago. While this does illustrate the stubborn resilience of received ideas, it has a personal compensation: the arguments made in the following are still worth making.

Besides the staff and fellows of SCAS, many individuals have helped me conceive and complete this work. In Göttingen during the early 1980s, Pasquale Pasquino

reoriented my scholarly sensibilities: besides introducing me to Wilhelm Hennis’s new work on Max Weber, whose social and economic analysis suffuses this book, Pasquale also introduced me to the work of Reinhart Koselleck. While many of my underlying ideas were formed in Cambridge during the 1970s, it was my time in Germany during the 1980s that enabled me to reconfigure and develop them, also greatly helped by the friendship of Istvan Hont in Cambridge, in New York and Princeton, and then back in Cambridge. In 2005 Roger Backhouse gave me the opportunity to teach his University of Birmingham course on the history of economic thought while he took study leave to work on his biography of Paul Samuelson. This was my first opportunity to convert my dispersed understanding of the history of economics into something like a coherent narrative; and the account that I present here would never have gained the form it has without the generous support of Roger through the years. His meticulous reading of the final draft was of major help in cleaning up a long and dense argument. More recently, the work and criticism of Ryan Walter has been a constant source of inspiration and support, and any coherence my concluding chapter has is owed to his comments upon earlier drafts. Finally, I was fortunate to have the enthusiastic support of Chris Stray, whose main interest is in the teaching of Classics and who is the leading authority on nineteenth-century Oxford and Cambridge. He was especially helpful in reviewing and commenting on several draft chapters, besides having for many years encouraged my interest in teaching and textbooks. I would also particularly like to thank:

Nafsika Alexiadou, Salma Ahmad, Paul Bew, Jeff Brider, Upal Chakrabarti, Ramesh Chandra, Simon Cook, Helen Curry, Maxime Desmarais-Tremblay, Mike Devereux, Colin Divall, Rebecca Earle, Alison Gaukroger, Geoff Harcourt, Jon Harwood, Akira Hayashima, Christine Heward, Anna Hont, Pat Hudson, Greta Jones, Béla Kapossy, Alon Kadish, Sharmin Khodaiji, Jürgen Kocka, Tony Lane, Gauthier Lanot, Roger Middleton, Robert Milward, Mike Savage, Stephen Savage, Marten Seppel, Nadim Shehadi, Jim Thomas, Grahame Thompson, David Vincent, Mike White, Richard Whitley, and Robbie Wokler.

I would also like to thank those who agreed to be interviewed about their careers, providing me with a perspective upon the development of economics in Britain I would not otherwise have gained:

Tibor Barna, Wilfred Beckerman, Michael Beesley, Bob Black, A. J. Brown, Charles Carter, Dennis Coppock, Bernard Corry, Alec Cairncross, Barrie Davies, Walter Eltis, Jack Gilbert, Sam Goldman, Douglas Hague, Henry Hardman, Bryan Hopkin, Terence Hutchison, Michael Kaser, Charlotte Lythe, Edgar Lythe, Sarah Orr, Henry Phelps Brown, Glyn Picton, Sigbert Prais, Brian Reddaway, Richard Lipsey, Eric Roll, Christopher Saunders, Albert Sloman, Marjorie Tivey, Ronald Tress, Bruce Williams, Tom Wilson, and G. D. N. Worswick.

Apart from the usual felicitations and apologies to family, I am also indebted to my wife Lin Jönsberg for the forthright way in which she challenged what I thought I was doing and helped me clarify my ideas.

I would like to thank the staff of the following libraries, archives, and institutions for their help in locating material:

Barclays Record Services (Jesse Campbell)

Institute of Bankers Library

Queen’s University Library, Belfast

University of Birmingham Library

University of Birmingham Archives (Christine Penny)

Marshall Library, University of Cambridge (Rhona Watson)

University Library, Cambridge (Dr. E. S. Leedham-Green)

Trinity College Library, Cambridge (Jonathan Smith)

University of Dundee Archives

University of Edinburgh Library, Special Collections

University of Exeter Library Archives

Glasgow University Library

Keele University Library (Martin Phillips and ILL staff)

Brotherton Library, University of Leeds, Special Collections

University of Liverpool Archives

The London Library

The British Library

University of London Library Archives (Carole Ibrahim)

British Library of Political and Economic Science Archives (Sue Donnelly)

King’s College, London Archives

University College, London, Special Collections

John Rylands University Library Archives, Manchester (Peter Nockels)

Centre for the History of Science and Technology, UMIST (Joe Marsh)

Manchester Central Library

Nuffield College Library, Oxford

Bodleian Library, Oxford

University of St. Andrews Special Collections

County Library, Worcester

Trinity College Library, Dublin

Universitätsbibliothek, Gießen

Niedersächsische Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek, Göttingen

Max Planck Institut für Geschichte, Göttingen

Universitätsbibliothek, Mannheim

Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Munich

Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris

University of Toronto Library Archives

Uppsala University Library.

Note to Readers

This is a book with a clear objective and a conclusion that, like any good Krimi, is not fully revealed until the last moment. There are many pages between here and there, and some readers could well be deterred by the structure and/or the institutional detail. The sequence of argument and evidence is, however, intended first of all to reorient the reader, and then lead that reader towards a denouement that follows on from the argument and evidence that has gone before.

That is the way I read the argument of this book, as grounded both empirically and analytically. Nonetheless, writers are in no position to dictate how their work is read; true, I think of this as a printed book with a beginning, middle, and end, but I have no idea in what conditions, for what purposes, or on what kind of devices it will be read. Nor am I in any position to insist that it be read in a particular way. This is a monograph that develops an argument about how, and why, the discipline of economics emerged in the early twentieth century as a university science, but along the way it demonstrates that this was no logical, determinate path with a pregiven outcome. Much of the detail documents the existence of alternatives that were either never adopted, or eventually rejected. There were also alternatives of which few contemporaries seemed aware at all. For example, while the teaching of commerce at the London School of Economics in interwar Britain never developed into an autonomous business curriculum, this was not for want of an available model. By the early 1920s German institutions had, in the space of about 20 years, invented not only a business curriculum, but also a unique form of managerial accounting. At the time few outside Germany, none in Britain, seem to have been aware of this.2

This one example demonstrates why the idea of any “rational reconstruction” of disciplinary development is flawed, is essentially teleological. I offer here instead a “historical reconstruction” in which false turns, individual ignorance, and institutional failure are fully documented. There is therefore a lot of detail. A reader is of course free to skip over this; indeed, many will read sections of the book as individual chapters on Oxford Scholar, using only the initial abstract as orientation. Readers of the print book can do likewise, but they would always have the option of leafing back to clarify points, skimming again through sections whose relevance has become more obvious to them as they work further through the text.

While this is indeed a book with a beginning, middle, and end, there is some signposting that will help readers who choose to read it differently; references backwards and forwards, of course, but the introductions to each part, and some repetition of relevant points within each chapter. While making the same point repeatedly is

2 Jack Gilbert attended Berlin’s Handelshochschule on a Cassel Travelling Scholarship in 1927–1928, but when asked for details of this in my 1994 interview with him he could recall nothing about why he went, nor could say how the teaching of the Handelshochschule differed from the London School of Economics, from which he graduated with a BCom (Honours) in 1929.

wearisome, the opposite extreme of expecting the reader to pick up on a point made perhaps several thousand words before is unhelpful. I have here sought to strike a balance.

Keith Tribe Malvern, December 2020

PART I FROM PUBLIC KNOWLEDGE TO INSTITUTIONAL DISCOURSE

1

Discourse and Discipline

This is a book about the transformation of economic discourse into a specialised form of knowledge acquired through university training, validated not through public discussion and debate, but through the procedural framework of the academy. Economic discourse became a form of knowledge with a career structure: legitimacy is now conferred on those advancing economic arguments by placement in this structure, not by reason alone. And so to understand the reproduction and legitimation of economic knowledge, we must look first to institutions and their functions, not to ‘ideas’ and ‘theories’.

It was the emergence of the modern university in late nineteenth-century America that facilitated this transformation in forms of knowledge that had existed since the seventeenth century. In the modern university, specialised academics were employed to teach students, submit them to competitive written examinations, and confer graded qualifications upon them. Those who were most successful in these examinations became qualified to teach the students who succeeded them; this process quickly standardised what was taught, and so what counted as modern economic reasoning. The career structure of the teachers became a function of the skill with which they elaborated the principles that were taught; the brightest students identified themselves by their facility in the increasingly refined and arcane knowledge to which they were exposed. By the 1930s there was a clear convergence between British, American, German, Austrian, Swedish, Dutch, French, and Italian specialised journals around a common core for the discipline of economics. In the course of 50 years, a new academic discipline had emerged and established itself.1 Then, during the second half of the twentieth century, the language of economics permeated the formulation and presentation of public policy. The national accounting framework that was developed in the 1940s, and the new macroeconomics into which it could be fitted, transformed the work of economic government into the pursuit of economic growth measured as Gross Domestic Product (GDP), the maintenance of a low rate of inflation, and a sustained low rate of unemployment. Economics had become a specialised form of knowledge whose principles and instruments suffused debate on public policy. This two-stage process—first the formation of a discipline, and then the framing of public policy in the language of this discipline—was initiated in Britain, where the first honours degree in economics was created, in Cambridge in 1903. However, before demonstrating how and why this happened, we need to form a clear understanding of the social and educational context within which this took place: not only what a

1 A discipline is a body of knowledge secured by its place within academic institutions. It can be characterised by a common mainstream core discourse supported by the career structures of teachers and students, journals, departments, training programmes, awards, reputations, textbooks, and specialist associations.

university was in the later nineteenth century, but the broader educational structure of which Cambridge University was a part. As I will demonstrate, the course of events in Cambridge leading to the creation in 1903 of the first three-year undergraduate economics degree could not have been replicated in Oxford; while what Alfred Marshall achieved in Cambridge depended upon a number of factors not directly linked to the existence of Cambridge University. We need to identify the relevant context in which Marshall was working; and this context was primarily shaped by social institutions and economic constraints, not by the existing understanding of political economy. While ‘ideas in context’ has become the watchword of modern intellectual history, here ‘context’ means not ‘other ideas’, but primarily the institutional framework that determines hierarchies of knowledge and their legitimation.

The following chapter will show that, while the main features of the modern university2 were created in the United States, a number of factors there initially hindered the rapid disciplinary development of economic knowledge that was possible in Britain around 1900. For a time, yet other circumstances constrained disciplinary development in Germany, France, and Italy, in all of which there were, however, many academics teaching and writing economics. Nonetheless, while Cambridge and its Professor of Political Economy, Alfred Marshall, did play a vital role as first mover in creating a new discipline, the rapid development of the London School of Economics (LSE) during the 1920s quickly challenged this pre-eminence. Maynard Keynes retained a base in Cambridge after resigning his lectureship in 1920, and in the 1930s was prominent in organising student discussion and steering talented Cambridge economics graduates into employment. However, by this time the LSE was becoming the national hub for graduate and undergraduate economic training, and so critical to the reproduction of what counted as economic knowledge.

At the LSE, Lionel Robbins set out explicitly to shape economics as a ‘science’, although he did not possess the technical skills of Marshall, Maynard Keynes, or Pigou. His appointment in 1929 as head of economics at the LSE coincided with the expansion of American departments and, critically, from 1933 onwards, a significant transatlantic movement of young German and Austrian refugees whose mathematical abilities were generally superior to those of their American peers. The increasingly technical development of economics in American universities during the 1930s and 1940s was linked to their developing graduate programmes, massively augmented by veterans’ programmes after the Second World War and substantial government funding. In the course of the 1940s, accelerated by the demands of war, there was a transition to the second stage of development, in which the technical economic reasoning that originated in universities found a public role. While this transition also occurred in Britain, it remained on a much more limited scale than in the United States, and it was not until the 1960s that taught Master’s programmes were introduced—at

2 Where disciplines are aligned with departments in which specialised academics who are both teachers and researchers cover the disciplinary core at different levels of teaching. This internal division of labour is doubled by a career hierarchy, replacing a university structure in which individual professors represented an entire subject of study—such as, for instance, Adam Smith as Professor of Moral Philosophy at the University of Glasgow from 1752 to 1764, or Henry Sidgwick with the same title at Cambridge from 1883 to 1900.

the University of Essex, and at the LSE. As English became the new world language, the language of economics became American.

This account of the formation of the discipline of economics is focussed upon the first of these two stages, the ‘British’ phase. Why did this process originate in Cambridge, and how did the form it was given shape international understanding of the nature of economic reasoning? Why did the form of reasoning developed in Cambridge soon lose ground to the alternative conception of ‘economic science’ associated with the LSE? As we shall see, rapid disciplinary advancement in Britain was hampered by the fact that relatively few students wished to study the new economics, at least in part because there was little that one could do with a university qualification in the subject, other than teach economics in school, college, or university. Outside school, college, and university, British employers in both the private and public sector generally remained indifferent to university-trained economists up until the 1970s at least. Hence Robbins was faced with an uphill struggle at the LSE in persuading students that the study of economics, as he conceived it, was a more worthwhile activity than the study of commerce, social administration, government, or even economic history.

This is not an institutional history; but institutions made ‘economics’ what it is today, and so schools, colleges, and universities are central to my story. However, understanding of even the recent history of formal education is today at a discount; personal experience and prejudice still shape educational debate and educational policy. As will become apparent, arguments made more than a century ago are still today confidently advanced as though they were new. In part, this is a recurrent property of the educational process. Formal education is the first direct experience of the social world that most children have beyond their family or household; but while in every case this experience is novel for each child, this does not mean that what that child experiences is new. Everyone grows up with their own experiences of the educational system. There is, however, little academic curiosity about the social institutions that have formed these life experiences, or their history.3

The discipline of economics was long in the making, but the reason it eventually became a discipline was owed to international changes in schooling and university towards the end of the nineteenth century. Cambridge was here a laggard; despite this, innovation became possible. To understand the circumstances conditioning both laggardliness and innovation, a broader context than Cambridge University has first to be laid out; this is done in the following two chapters. Running through this broader context are arguments about economic education and vocational training— the perennial issue of the suitability of the education provided by school and university to the demands of employment and the labour market. Since the mid-nineteenth century at the latest, the distinction of vocational training from the training of minds has been a constant. Economics has been variously presented both as a vocational subject suited to the demands of the modern economy, and/or as an intellectually

3 And the low status of ‘history of education’ among academic historians was the first point that Peter Mandler made in a series of lectures reviewing secondary and tertiary education in Britain during the twentieth century: ‘Educating the Nation I: Schools’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society Vol. 24 (2014), p. 5.

demanding subject whose apparent detachment from immediate everyday circumstances is a mark of its scientific status. As we shall see, in arguing for the Economics Tripos, Alfred Marshall used both lines of argument simultaneously.

Part II then provides an explanation of why it was that Cambridge became the first mover in disciplinary development, even though it was in the early 1900s still adapting to the new disciplinary dynamics unleashed by the modern university. Marshall occupied the chair of political economy for some 20 years before he was successful in establishing a three-year honours degree in economics as the Economics Tripos.4 But in order to understand what he sought to achieve, and why he found existing teaching unsuitable as a vehicle for this, we need to understand the nature of the Mathematical Tripos that gave him his model for training. He considered the Moral Sciences Tripos, the framework in which economics was taught in later nineteenthcentury Cambridge, more hindrance than help in training young economists. This is the context out of which Marshall constructed his conception of a modern economics, embodied in the Economics Tripos inaugurated in 1903. Nonetheless, this was only a new beginning, not a final destination; and it was a new beginning that proved less successful than has usually been assumed. The second chapter of Part II presents the work of the Tripos over its first 50 years through an analysis of degree results, turning our attention away from the recollections of the select few for whom success in the Tripos was the foundation of a career as an economist, and towards the more modest achievements of the mass of students who passed through it. Part II is then concluded with a consideration of what kind of economics Marshall and his colleagues sought to promote: What was ‘Marshallianism’? Clarity is needed on this question since it is central to explaining the waning of what at first appeared to be the international hegemony of Cambridge economics.

However, before dealing with the waning influence of Cambridge, Part III examines two important ‘paths not taken’. Firstly, before his appointment to the Cambridge chair Alfred Marshall had been teaching political economy to Indian Civil Service students in Oxford. Furthermore, from the later 1880s onwards, many Oxford graduates moved into important positions—E. C. K. Gonner to the new chair of economics in Liverpool, W. J. Ashley to the chair of commerce in Birmingham, Edwin Cannan to teach at LSE in 1895, then becoming professor in 1907. The first Director of the LSE, W. A. S. Hewins, was also an Oxford man; Francis Edgeworth, appointed Professor of Political Economy in Oxford in 1891, was another. It would, therefore, be natural to conclude that Oxford would have been a suitable base for what Marshall sought to achieve in Cambridge. However, as Chapter 7 demonstrates, had Marshall remained in Oxford it would have been unlikely that he could have achieved there what he did achieve in Cambridge. There were differences between Oxford and Cambridge with regard to teaching and learning that made it easier to innovate in Cambridge at the level of university rather than college, even though ‘Oxford economists’ were nationally prominent in the later nineteenth century.

4 A Cambridge Honours undergraduate programme is called a Tripos, possibly after the three-legged stool on which students are said to have sat during oral examinations, during the years before the development of written examinations towards the end of the eighteenth century.

Related to this ‘path not taken’ by the newly-emerging discipline is a second idea that has gained common acceptance: that the emergence of Marshall’s form of analytical economics contributed to the sidelining of an alternative, historical vision of what the discipline of economics could be. Chapter 8 outlines a story in which Oxford plays a prominent part, given the influence of Arnold Toynbee at Balliol in the 1880s and the more general pedagogic importance of Modern History in Oxford. I demonstrate that the apparent alternative supplied by ‘Historical Economics’ as a model for disciplinary development was chimerical; the critique of contemporary developments in economics made by Ashley and Cunningham remained a critique, and was never translated into a viable alternative disciplinary programme.

Part IV then turns to examine the way in which the teaching of economics did actually develop outside Cambridge in the early twentieth century: through the medium of the teaching of commerce, a more broadly vocational enterprise. When Alfred Marshall in his 1885 Cambridge Inaugural lecture made the case for economics as a modern university subject with important vocational implications, he was in fact repeating an argument already rehearsed in the United States, France, and Germany concerning the importance of commercial education. Marshall’s argument was significant not because of its general content, but because his vision of vocationallyoriented university education involved the teaching of economics, not commerce. In fact, outside Oxford and Cambridge all advanced teaching of economics in Britain until mid-century would for the most part be done in university departments or faculties oriented to commercial education that to a greater or lesser extent modelled themselves upon the American, French, or German experience. Chapter 9 provides an overview of the international development of higher commercial education in the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to lend perspective to British developments that often invoked these foreign models. British developments are then outlined in Chapters 10 and 11, in the latter dealing with the LSE separately, given the significance of its place as part of the University of London in the organisation of higher learning in Britain and its Empire. Common to Chapters 10 and 11 is, however, a single theme: that there was a consistent, if limited, demand for advanced commercial education from both students and employers, but that in a university context the vocational focus of commercial education had little academic support. The LSE was until at least the mid-1950s an institution the bulk of whose graduates had pursued strictly vocational courses of study in social administration, commerce, and government within the framework of a new bachelor of science degree—the BSc (Econ). However, staff appointments made from the later 1920s increasingly emphasised academic rather than vocational capacities, and it was in this context that Lionel Robbins sought to develop economics as a ‘science’. Chapter 12 examines quite what this science was, and how it established itself in opposition to the ‘Marshallian tradition’ of economic analysis outlined in Chapter 6. The transition in Britain towards the science of economics coincided with parallel developments in the United States that would during the 1940s become established as the new mainstream for economics on an international scale.

The Initial Framework

My interest in these matters dates from the mid-1980s, when I was a contributor to an international project, led by Istvan Hont, studying the institutionalisation of political economy.5 Initially conceived as a review of the founding chairs of political economy in Europe, its scope was extended to include the United States and Japan, and was broadened into a history of the national origins of regular university teaching in economics. Working groups assembled their own regional histories, often enough starting from a presumption that economics as an institutionalised discourse had diffused from Britain, Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations being generally accepted as the founding text of modern economic thought. Robert Malthus and David Ricardo were at that time seen as building upon Smith, shaping a ‘classical economics’ that was later displaced by a ‘neoclassical economics’ linked to an academic turn heralding the emergence of modern economic science.6 The broad international acceptance of this essentially canonical history of theory owed much to an anglophone prejudice centred on the emergence of modern economics as the work of ‘great thinkers’ from Smith to Jevons, whose ‘ideas’ flowed forth irrespective of awkward issues such as the fact that if there was a global language in the nineteenth century it was French; or that Jean-Baptiste Say was the primary influence on early American teaching of political economy, and that his work provided a crucial bridge in Germany and Britain to the emergence of ‘neoclassicism’.7

As the project developed, this starting point was superseded by the growing realisation that the institutionalisation of economics—the first step in creating the discipline of economics—seemed in fact to have been a more or less simultaneous occurrence, across Continental Europe, North America, Japan, and also, importantly, in Britain. From a project initially concerned simply with charting the ‘first national chairs’ in political economy, there developed a broader view of international developments; one focussed more upon political economy as public knowledge than upon the history of economic ‘thought’ as such. The national histories that were written and published8

5 From 1982 to 1986 the project was organised from the Research Centre of King’s College, Cambridge— see, for a brief account, Gregory Claeys, Istvan Hont, Alon Kadish and Keith Tribe, ‘Editorial Preface: The Institutionalization of Political Economy in Europe, the United States and Japan’, in Alon Kadish, Keith Tribe (eds.) The Market for Political Economy. The Advent of Economics in British University Culture, 1850–1905, Routledge, London 1995, pp. viii–xi.

6 For a survey of the ‘history of economic thought’ in the twentieth century, see Roger E. Backhouse, Philippe Fontaine, ‘Contested Identities: The History of Economics since 1945’, in Backhouse and Fontaine (eds.) A Historiography of the Modern Social Sciences, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 2014, pp. 183–210.

7 I have sketched this argument in The History of Economics. A Course for Students and Teachers (with Roger E. Backhouse), Agenda, Newcastle upon Tyne 2018 Lectures 6 & 7.

8 The French contributions were published under the editorship of Lucette LeVan-Lemesle as Les problèmes de l’institutionnalisation de l’économie politique en France au XIXe siècle, Oeconomia, Paris 1986. Further national volumes that have appeared are C. Sugiyama, H. Mizuta (eds.) Enlightenment and Beyond. Political Economy Comes to Japan, University of Tokyo Press, Tokyo 1988; M. Augello, M. Bianchini, G. Gioli, P. Roggi (eds.) La cattedre politica in Italia. La diffusione di una disciplina <sospetta> (1750–1900), Franco Angeli, Milan 1988; N. Waszek (ed.) Die Institutionalisierung der Nationalökonomie an den deutschen Universitäten, Scripta Mercurae Verlag, St. Katherinen 1988; W. J. Barber (ed.) Breaking the Academic Mould. Economists and American Higher Learning in the Nineteenth Century, Wesleyan University Press, Middletown Conn. 1988. Lucette LeVan-Lemesle has more recently published Le juste et la riche. L’enseignement de l’économie politique 1815–1950, Comité pour l’histoire économique et financière

remained, however, so many strands in a process whose own dynamics were obscure; why did so many of these strands interlink and overlap in the last two decades of the nineteenth century? This was implicitly the question of how the uniformity of a new discipline emerged and propagated, a process upon which conventional historiographic models in the history of the sciences shed little light. Considering this problem in the later 1980s, a rather different perspective began to emerge: working not from the question of how ‘modern economic thinking’ became embedded in institutional sites, but instead from the way in which the creation of the modern university shaped and validated what counted as ‘modern economic thinking’.

As already noted, the history of formal and informal education in Britain is poorly understood; there is little in the way of informed public debate about the evolution of schooling and universities, and little readily-available literature to which one can refer for illumination. Alison Wolf’s Does Education Matter?9 confronts many of the misconceptions about the relationship of education to economy still repeated in current debate, and Stefan Collini has charted the development of the ‘postmodern’ university in Britain;10 but there is an absence of an integrated, historical analysis of education, schooling, training, further and higher education that places British developments in an international context. The elements from which such an understanding could be built do, however, exist in three key texts: Fritz Ringer’s Education and Society in Modern Europe (1979), Michael Sanderson’s Universities and British Industry 1850–1970 (1972), and Robert Locke’s End of Practical Man (1984). No comparable synthetic overview drawing on original research has since been published.

Not only did Ringer keep the vocational connection of education and employment clearly in view; he treated secondary-level schooling and university education together in considering the social basis of admission to advanced education and recruitment to professional occupations and public employment. The advance of European universities, both in number of students and range of study, presupposed the existence of schooling that would prepare middle- and lower-class students; no modern university system could develop on the basis of highly selective, elite schooling, since such selection was primarily social, not by ability, and hence was limited. Correspondingly, a broadly-based schooling system screened and certified its pupils in relation to the labour market, and he made three systematic distinctions relevant to this:

1. An inclusive system is one that schools a relatively large proportion of the population of the relevant age group.

2. A progressive education system is one that draws a large proportion of its advanced students from the lower middle and lower classes.

de la France, Paris 2004; and Augello and Guidi have also considerably extended their original work into Economisti e scienza economica nell’Italia liberale (1848–1922), 2 vols., Franco Angeli, Milan 2019.

9 Alison Wolf, Does Education Matter? Myths about Education and Economic Growth, Penguin Books, London 2002.

10 Stefan Collini, Speaking of Universities, Verso, London 2017.

3. A segmented or tracked system is one in which parallel courses of study are separated by institutional or curricular barriers, as well as differences in the social origins of their students.11

The core of his book deals with a comparison of nineteenth-century German and French educational systems, using the insights gleaned from this to shed light on English and American systems. His approach was elaborated in later collaborative work that adopted his focus upon university and secondary education in the context of occupational structure and labour market demands. One point relevant here was the argument that proposals for more practical training were aimed chiefly at students from middle or lower social classes, while the retention of more elevated pathways preserved the social standing of children of an elite. He argued, therefore, that it would be more appropriate to consider educational transformation more in terms of social effects than economic needs. Hence his conclusion that ‘[t]he old assumption that educational expansion has meant “democratisation” in the sense of increased individual socio-occupational mobility has thus lost most of its credibility.’12

Whereas Ringer injected a rare analytical perspective into the history of schooling and education, Michael Sanderson’s Universities and British Industry13 provided a path-breaking account of the way in which British universities had contributed to technological change and industrial innovation from the later nineteenth century. Broadly a story of ‘education, research and economy’, this study is notable for the detailed treatment of university institutions on the basis of archival records. Although Sanderson’s main focus is on the way in which university physics, chemistry, and engineering interacted with industrial development, the fact that he devoted twice as many pages to the civic universities (Chs. 2 and 3) as he did to Oxford and Cambridge (Ch. 1) was at the time very unusual, while he also devoted a separate chapter to the development of the teaching of commerce as an early form of business education. While his treatment of early economic and commercial education is now superseded by the following chapters, Sanderson did provide a valuable baseline from which research could develop.

Sanderson’s book was an early inspiration for my own work in this area, and was the model for an earlier version of the present book that would have presented a comprehensive account of the development of commerce and economics in British universities up to the 1960s. However, this ambition soon foundered on the realisation that British university records from the 1940s to the early 2000s were sparse. While the Cambridge University Reporter has provided a consistent record of teaching, degree results, and university organisation from the later nineteenth century to the present, from the later 1940s most university publications ceased even listing current members of departments and courses of study; and departmental records were not archived.

11 Fritz Ringer, Education and Society in Modern Europe, Indiana University Press, Bloomington 1979, pp. 22–29.

12 Fritz Ringer, ‘Introduction’, in Detlef K. Müller, Fritz Ringer, Brian Simon (eds.) The Rise of the Modern Educational System: Structural Change and Social Reproduction 1870–1920, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1987, p. 3.

13 Michael Sanderson, The Universities and British Industry 1850–1950, Routledge and Kegan Paul, London 1972.

For the second half of the twentieth century we will never be able to reconstruct with any degree of accuracy the composition of departments, courses taught, student numbers, and degrees, let alone the future employment of graduates.14 What can be done with properly maintained archives is shown by Jan-Otmar Hesse’s exemplary history of academic economics in postwar West Germany.15 The core of his work is constructed from the ground up, tracking appointments, the formation of professional associations, the funding of research, the flows of students, and the training of future teachers of the subject. When I turned in the 1990s to interviewing some of those who had built teaching and departments in British universities during the 1950s, seeking a substitute for the absence of records outside Cambridge and the LSE, it transpired that most of my subjects no longer had a clear memory of this phase of their careers, although their memory of their own education remained clear, and verifiable from contemporary records. I am, however, fortunate that archival records became scarce only at the point that here forms a natural conclusion, in the 1940s.

The merit of Robert Locke’s End of Practical Man was to bring together the systematisation of Ringer and the subject matter of Sanderson. He noted that arguments by economic historians concerning the presence or absence of entrepreneurial failure in later nineteenth-century France and England paid no attention to the role of education. Ringer, by contrast, emphasised the manner in which higher education in France and Germany was used as a vehicle for social mobility, neglecting the impact of commercial education on economy and labour market. Locke noted that

[a]n investigation into the curricula of competing national systems of higher education may not be essential to the writing of the social history of education but it is crucial for an analysis of higher education and entrepreneurial performance. Ringer’s emphasis on social history has, therefore, led him to follow analytical procedures which, in my opinion, have ended in erroneous revisionist conclusions about the relative efficaciousness of French and German higher technical and commercial education. His work suffers from the defect of most education histories. It makes observations about the impact that education had on economic activities without adequately studying the relationship between the two.16

Locke sought to marry the economic historian’s focus upon industrial development to the curricular organisation of the educational institutions established to further vocational ends linked to economic development. Engineering, in general, and factory organisation, in particular, were in this way brought into contact with what it meant

14 And investigating contemporary higher education policy in the late 1980s, I was surprised to find that the official annual UK data on university graduates by subject and first destinations was available only as duplicated pages of A4; my own university department could have done better. By contrast, the data I obtained on US Higher Education for 1988 was a model of presentation and detail. See my ‘The “US Model” for Higher Education: Structure and Finance’, in Peter W. G. Wright (ed.) Industry and Higher Education. Collaboration to Improve Students’ Learning and Training, Society for Research into Higher Education & Open University Press, Buckingham 1990, pp. 43–58.

15 Jan-Otmar Hesse, Wirtschaft als Wissenschaft. Die Volkswirtschaftlehre in der frühen Bundesrepublik, Campus Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 2010; and my review in German History Vol. 31 (2013), pp. 443–44.

16 Robert R. Locke, The End of the Practical Man. Entrepreneurship and Higher Education in Germany, France, and Great Britain 1880–1940, JAI Press, Greenwich, Conn. 1984, p. 5.

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