Abstract
In 1950, war broke out between North and South Korea, the most significant conflict yet in the Cold War. In 1950, Harry Truman signed a top-secret document declaring that “every individual faces the ever-present possibility of annihilation” as long as “freedom” had to do battle against Soviet “slavery.” In 1950, Indians celebrated the approval of their recently independent nation’s first constitution. In 1950, Mao Zedong consolidated his hold over the newly established People’s Republic of China, the founding of which had marked the biggest advance in communism’s reach since the birth of the Soviet Union. In 1950, the French Foreign Minister Robert Schuman called for an international organization that could supervise French and German production of coal and steel; Schuman’s proposal would lead, eventually, to the formation of the European Coal and Steel Community, forerunner of the European Union. In 1950, Britain’s voters returned the Labour government to power, barely; they rescinded this stay of execution one year later, ushering in more than a decade of Conservative rule.
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Notes
Quoted in Curt Caldwell, NSC-68 and the Political Economy of the Early Cold War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 12. 2. Maurice Dobb to Theodor Prager, December 4, 1957, MHD, CB19; Dobb to Prager, December 23, 1950, MHD, CB19. 3. The phrase comes from Johnson, Shadow of Keynes. 4. Maurice Dobb to Theodor Prager, September 6, 1949, MHD, CB19. Dobb had played a small, inadvertent role in bringing Kaldor to Cambridge. As Kaldor later wrote to Barbara, Dobb “was the External Examiner for the B. Sc. (Econ) degree in 1930, and as [Lionel] Robbins wrote to me afterwards, I owed my ‘first’ mainly to the External Examiner who marked me up.” Nicholas Kaldor to Barbara Dobb, September 11, 1976, MHD, AG1. Their relationship would not always be as peaceful as its promising start suggested. After losing to Dobb in a campaign for membership on the Faculty Board, Kaldor complained — to Sraffa of all people — that “marginal utility theory has won.” Amartya Sen, “Autobiography,” http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/economics/laureates/1998/sen.html?print=1. 5. Maurice Dobb to Theodor Prager, December 12, 1950, MHD, CB19; Dobb to Prager, September 6, 1949, MHD, CB19.
Paul Samuelson, Foundations of Economic Analysis (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1947), iii. On the relationships between mathematics and economics see E. Roy Weintraub, HowEconomics Became a Mathematical Science and, on the postwar moment specifically, Joel Isaac, “Tool Shock: Technique and Epistemology in the Postwar Social Sciences,” History of Political Economy 42 (Supplement) (2010), 133–64. Mark Blaug, “The Formalist Revolution of the 1950s,” Journal of the History of Economic Thought 25.2 (June 2003), 145–56 is also helpful, although only a minority of economists actually practiced formalist mathematics. Paul Samuelson, “How Foundations Came to Be,” Journal of Economic Literature 36.3 (September 1998), 1375–86 illuminates the period from the perspective of a participant-observer. Mary Morgan, The World in the Model: How Economists Work and Think (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012) is the richest account yet of modeling in economics.
This is the arc Mary Morgan traces in “Economics,” The Cambridge History of Science: Modern Social Sciences, ed. Theodore Porter and Dorothy Ross (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 275–305. Morgan does not remark on the echoes in the rhetoric of engineering with Engels’s prediction of the birth of “the conversion of political rule over men into an administration of things.” Engels, Anti-Duhring, 283. As noted above, Dobb was even more explicit on this point in Russian Economic Development’s celebration of “engineers in leather-jackets.” Dobb, Russian, 400.
Paul Samuelson, Economics (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1955), 212. On the IS-LM model, see Warren Young, Interpreting Mr. Keynes: The IS-LM Enigma (Oxford: Polity Press, 1987) and Robert Diamond, “Keynes, IS-LM, and the Marshallian Tradition,” History of Political Economy 39.1 (Spring 2007), 81–95. For the neoclassical synthesis, see Olivier Jean, “Neoclassical Synthesis,” in The New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics, eds Steven Durlauf and Lawrence Blume (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 896–9. Philip Mirowski and D. Wade Hands, “A Paradox of Budgets: The Postwar Stabilization of American Neoclassical Demand Theory,” in From Interwar Pluralism to Postwar Neoclassicism, eds Mary Morgan and Malcolm Rutherford (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998), esp. 288–9 documents the surprising flexibility of neoclassical demand theory and its importance to the project’s success at winning converts in the postwar.
Lawrence Klein, TheKeynesian Revolution (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1947).
For “Americanized,” see Roger Backhouse, The Penguin History of Economics (London: Penguin Books, 2002), 307. “Internationalization” comes from A.W. Coats, ed., The Post-1945 Internationalization of Economics (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1997). See also Marion Fourcade, “The Construction of a Global Profession: The Transnationalization of Economics,” American Journal of Sociology 112.1 (July 2006), 145–94.
Guy Ortolano, The Two Cultures Controversy: Science, Literature and Cultural Politics in PostwarBritain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 103— 9; Backhouse, “Economics in mid-Atlantic,” 20; Backhouse, “Economics,” Social Sciences, 51; Fourcade, Economists and Societies, 150; Tribe, “Cambridge Economics Tripos.”
Quoted in Mark Mazower, Governing the World: The History of an Idea (New York: Penguin, 2012), 274. Dobb could have found evidence for economists’ influence over policy within his own department: Keynes had led the British at Bretton Woods with assistance from Dennis Robertson; James Meade, Robertson’s successor as professor of political economy, helped devise Britain’s national income accounts and became director of the economic section of the war cabinet; Austin Robinson worked for the Cabinet Office, Ministry of Production, and Board of Trade in World War II and spent half a year helping implement the Marshall Plan with the Organization for European Economic Co-Operation; and Kaldor would be called to advise governments in India, Ceylon, Mexico, Ghana, British Guiana, Turkey, Iran, and Venezuela.
Tooze, Wages of Destruction, 676. The “golden age” formulation is now especially popular on the left. See Stephen Marglin and Juliet Schor, eds, The Golden Age of Capitalism: Reinterpreting the Postwar Experience (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992); Hobsbawm, Age of Extremes, 225–400; Wolfgang Streeck, “The Crises of Democratic Capitalism,” New Left Review 71 (September—October 2011), 5–29.
Maurice Dobb, “Recent Trends in Economic Theory in Britain and America,” 1955, MHD, DA22. See also Dobb, Economic Theory and Socialism, 104–17.
Maurice Dobb, “Pound Sterling,” Labour Monthly, November 1949, 341. Anders Stephanson has defended with particular force a modified version of Dobb’s thesis, arguing that “the cold war was from the outset not only a US term but a US project.” Anders Stephanson, “Cold War Degree Zero” in Uncertain Empire: American History and the Idea of the Cold War, eds Joel Isaac and Duncan Bell (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 26. For Soviet reluctance to match American bellicosity, see Vladimir Pechatnov, “The Soviet Union and the World, 1944–1953” in The Cambridge History of the Cold War, Vol. 1: Origins, eds Melvyn Leffler and Odd Arne Westad (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 90–111.
Paul Krugman, Development, Geography, and Economic Theory (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1995), 24. Krugman overstates his case slightly. Although the classic development works bear little resemblance to what Samuelson and Solow (his examples) were writing, a considerable number of economists at the time would have had an easier time interpreting, say, Albert Hirschman than Samuelson and Solow. Only the later triumph of Krugman’s preferred style makes these rivals seem antique. On development economics, in addition to Cullather and Cooper’s articles cited above, see Albert Hirschman, “The Rise and Decline of Development Economics” in Essays in Trespassing: Economics to Politics and Beyond (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 1–24 and Sharad Chari and Stuart Corbridge, eds, The Development Reader (London: Routledge, 2008). Mazower, Governing the World, esp. 214— 304 situates the movement in the larger history of global governance, while Jeremy Adelman, Worldly Philosopher: The Odyssey of Albert O. Hirschman (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013) provides a masterful account of the life of one of its most prominent practitioners.
Mark Bradley, “Decolonization, the Global South and the Cold War, 1919–1962” in The Cambridge History of the Cold War, Vol. 1: Origins, eds Melvyn Leffler and Odd Arne Westad (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 464. On Britain’s decolonization, see Ronald Hyam, Britain’s DecliningEmpire: The Road to Decolonisation, 1918–1968 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).
David Ekbladh, The GreatAmerican Mission: Modernization and the Construction of an American World Order (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010) details the roots of development in the United States.
Raul Prebisch, The Economic Development of Latin America and Its Principal Problems (New York: United Nations, 1950).
Maurice Dobb, Some Aspects of Economic Development (Delhi: Ranjit Printers and Publishers, 1951), 2, 17, 33.
Paul Sweezy to Maurice Dobb, September 18,1954, MHD, CA212; Kenneth May, “Review of On Economic Theory and Socialism, Collected Papers,” Econometrica 26.1 (January 1958), 184; Walter Adams, “Review of On Economic Theory and Socialism, Collected Papers,” Annals ofthe American Academy of Political and Social Science 309 (January 1957), 211; Paul Baran, “Review of On Economic Theory and Socialism, Collected Papers,” Economic Journal 67.267 (September 1957), 504; Maurice Dobb to Cecil Franklin, November 11, 1953, MHD, CA189.
Maurice Dobb to Rudolph Schlesinger, January 3, 1955, MHD, CB25. The phrase appears to have stuck in his head that day, since he also used it in a letter to Prager. Maurice Dobb to Theodor Prager, January 3, 1955, MHD, CB19.
Michael Christofferson, French Intellectuals Against the Left: The Antitotalitarian Moment of the 1970s (New York: Berghahn Books, 2004), 32. On Past and Present’s founding, see Christopher Hill, R.H. Hilton, and E.J. Hobsbawm, “Past and Present Origins and Early Years,” Past and Present 100 (August 1983), 3–14. Dobb was a board member, but according to Hill, Hilton and Hobsbawm not an especially vigorous one — “loyal but silent,” in their phrase. Hill, Hilton and Hobsbawm, “Past and Present,” 10.
Maurice Dobb, “Review of The Theory of Capitalist Development,” Science and Society 7.3 (Summer 1943), 270; Maurice Dobb, foreword to The Theory of CapitalistDevelopment, by Paul Sweezy (London: Dennis Dobson, 1946), vii— ix; Paul Sweezy to Maurice Dobb, September 3, 1955, MHD, CA212; and Sweezy to Dobb, February 12, 1947, MHD, CA212.
Paul Sweezy, “A Rejoinder,” in The Transition from Feudalism to Capitalism, ed. Rodney Hilton (Delhi: Aakar Books, 2006), 103.
Christopher Hill, “A Comment,” in The Transition from Feudalism to Capitalism, ed. Rodney Hilton (Delhi: Aakar Books, 2006), 118; Rodney Hilton, “A Comment,” in The Transition from Feudalism to Capitalism, ed. Rodney Hilton (Delhi: Aakar Books, 2006), 109.
Giuliano Procacci, “A Survey of the Debate,” in The Transition from Feudalism to Capitalism, ed. Rodney Hilton (Delhi: Aakar Books, 2006), 142.
Paul Sweezy to Maurice Dobb, January 1, 1954, MHD, CA212; Sweezy to Dobb, February 7, 1954, MHD, CA212.
See E.A. Kosminsky, “The Evolution of Feudal Rent in England from the XIth to the XVth Centuries,” Past and Present 7 (April 1955), 12–36; Brian Manning, “The Nobles, the People, and the Constitution,” Past and Present 9 (April 1956), 42–64; and P. Vilar, “Problems of the Formation of Capitalism,” Past and Present 10 (November 1956), 15–38.
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© 2013 Timothy Shenk
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Shenk, T. (2013). Debates. In: Maurice Dobb. Palgrave Studies in History of Economic Thought Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137297020_7
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