Who Makes History? On the Entanglements of Economics and Politics

Abstract

It is an unusual pleasure for me to address this Congress, though your opening speaker cannot claim to be an economic historian. I have praised your discipline but never practised it. Such praise was easy to justify in looking at the London School of Economics whose centenary history I have recently written. The founding Director, W.A.S. Hewins, was an economic historian — or was he more a late nineteenth-century historical economist? As the social sciences unfolded, such ambiguities gave way to tidier departmental divisions. While Lionel Robbins and Friedrich von Hayek on the one hand, and Harold Laski on the other, took economics and politics down their increasingly separate paths, Arthur Bowley and Roy Allen advanced, under the name of statistics, sample research and econometrics and other quantitative sports, and the Director, Sir William (later Lord) Beveridge, sought to promote social biology as the only truly scientific branch of social studies. Yet students in the interwar years flocked to R.H. Tawney and his colleagues, Michael Postan, Eileen Power. Perhaps the economic historians were simply nicer than the rest, but there was — and is — something special about the discipline too. The anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski meant it as a compliment of course when he described economic history as the social anthropology of the past. Today, economic history is the only social science left which combines as a matter of course the descriptive and the theoretical, the qualitative and the quantitative, indeed economics and history and much in between.

Opening Address to the International Economic History Congress, delivered at the Teatro della Scala, Milan, on 12 September 1994