Abstract
In 1925, Maurice Dobb was a young man with a freshly minted PhD, a lectureship in economics at the University of Cambridge, and a problem. He had just been asked by one of his mentors, Dennis Robertson, if he would like to become an Assistant Director of Studies at Trinity College. The title was not a sinecure — actual teaching would be required — but it provided some obvious perks, including an institutional affiliation with one of the hubs of Cambridge economics and a bump in his paycheck. Delighted, he accepted Robertson’s proposal.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
Michael Ellman, “Review of The Development of Socialist Economic Thought: Selected Essays by Maurice Dobb,” De Economist 157.1 (2009), 123.
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).
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 discussing his political goals.
Timothy Blanning, The Pursuit ofGlory: 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 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 canonical 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 origins; 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).
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 College de France, 1977–1978 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007) and Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the College de France, 1978–1979 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008).
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 reflections 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).
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, 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).
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).
Jeffry Frieden, Global Capitalism: Its Fall and Rise in the Twentieth Century (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2007), 173–228.
John Markoff and Veronica Montecinos, “The Ubiquitous Rise of Economists,” Journal of PublicPolicy 13.1 (January 1993), 37–68; Philip Mirowski and Dieter Plehwe, eds, The Road from Mont Pelerin; and Daniel Rodgers, Age of Fracture (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011), 41–76.
And when they do acknowledge economists, they are typically named either Friedrich Hayek or John Maynard Keynes, who are then cast as mighty opposites defending their respective ideologies. See, for example, Tony Judt’s contention that “the three quarters of [a] century that followed Austria’s collapse in the 1930s can be seen as a duel between Keynes and Hayek,” though also note his conversation partner Timothy Snyder’s remark that “One of the things which has happened in the meantime, which is less showy than the duel down the decades between Keynes and Hayek, is the displacement of full employment … by the now-dominant category of economic growth.” Tony Judt, with Timothy Snyder, Thinking the Twentieth Century (New York: The Penguin Press, 2012), 29, 345. For some of the limitations of the Keynes-vs.-Hayek framework, see Tyler Goodspeed, Rethinking the Keynesian Revolution: Keynes, Hayek, and the Wicksell Connection (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012).
Valuable investigations of the relationship between ideas and politics in twentieth-century Britain that run counter to this tendency include Michael Freeden, “The Stranger at the Feast: Ideology and Public Policy in Twentieth-Century Britain,” Twentieth Century British History 1.1 (1990), 9–34; José Harris, “Political Thought and the Welfare State, 1870–1940: An Intellectual Framework for British Social Policy,” Past and Present 135.1 (1992), 116–41; E.H.H. Green, Ideologies of Conservatism: Conservative Political Ideas in the Twentieth Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002); Ben Jackson, Equality and the British Left: A Study in Progressive Political Thought, 1900— 1964 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007); and Ben Jackson and Robert Saunders, eds, Making Thatcher’s Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012).
Maurice Dobb, “A Sceptical View of the Theory of Wages,” The Economic Journal 39.156 (December 1929), 242.
See Jacques Derrida, Margins of Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982) and Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics (London: Verso, 1985), 93–148.
Duncan Bell outlines the advantages of eschewing both internalist and externalist accounts of disciplinary formation in “Writing the World: Disciplinary History and Beyond,” International Affairs 85.1 (January 2009), 3–22.
Eric Hobsbawm, “Maurice Dobb (1900–1976),” in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 2004, http://www.oxforddnb.com; Amartya Sen, “Maurice Dobb,” in Political Economy in the Twentieth Century, ed. Maxine Berg (Savage, MD: Barnes and Noble Books, 1990), 26–34.
A.J.P. Taylor, “Athanasius in King Street,” Observer, March 27, 1966.
The standard account of this process is David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005). Daniel Yergin and Joseph Stanislaw, The Commanding Heights: The Battle for the World Economy (New York: Touchstone, 1998) shares the general structure of Harvey’s account but turns Harvey’s villains into heroes. Peter Evans and William Sewell, Jr., “The Neoliberal Era: Ideology, Policy, and Social Effects,” in Social Resilience in the Neoliberal Era, eds Peter Hall and Michele Lamont (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming) offers a subtler reading that nevertheless accords with much of Harvey’s analysis. For the beginnings of an interpretation that moves beyond this framework, see Foucault, Birth of Biopolitics; Mirowski and Plehwe, eds, The Road From Mont Pelerin; Johanna Bockman, Markets in the Name of Socialism: The Left-Wing Origins of Neoliberalism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011); and Angus Burgin, The Great Persuasion: Reinventing Free Markets since the Depression (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2012).
Copyright information
© 2013 Timothy Shenk
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Shenk, T. (2013). Introduction: The Communist Party Economist. In: Maurice Dobb. Palgrave Studies in History of Economic Thought Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137297020_1
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137297020_1
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-45199-9
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-29702-0
eBook Packages: Palgrave Economics & Finance CollectionEconomics and Finance (R0)