Life and Vision

Abstract

Shackle asked a question to which his life’s work is an answer:

Is the economy to be seen as a machine, an organism, a battlefield or a drill ground, or is its history like an oral saga maintained and embellished by a hundred generations of individual poets? (1966a, p. 6)

The timelines and key areas of George Shackle’s contributions are clear. In the late 1930s he first made his mark as a theorist of the business cycle. Throughout his academic life, he was respected for his explanations of the meaning and significance of Keynes’s macroeconomics. Shackle was a key participant in post-war microeconomic debates over the theory of choice under uncertainty. Although his campaign to set the agenda for the further development of choice theory faltered during the 1950s, his insights deserve recognition, as later chapters show. In the second part of his career, the 1960s and the decades following his retirement in 1969, he earned new respect as an historian of economic thought and philosopher of economics. However, his work is unified by the expression of his underlying vision of economic life.