Primer: Agriculture, the Royal Institution, and the Spirit of Improvement April 7, 2011
Posted by Will Thomas in EWP Primer.Tags: Arthur Young, Count Rumford, David Ricardo, Duke of Bedford, Duke of Bridgewater, Earl of Winchilsea, Humphry Davy, Jan Golinski, John Sinclair, Joseph Banks, Joseph Priestley, Justus Liebig, Mary Morgan, Morris Berman, Thomas Malthus
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Since my interest in agricultural research focuses on the activities of the 20th-century British state, I didn’t really expect to return to Britain’s original Board of Agriculture (1793-1820). But then the head of our Centre here at Imperial, Andy Mendelsohn, showed up in my office a couple of weeks ago with Morris Berman’s Social Change and Scientific Organization: The Royal Institution, 1799-1844 (1978), which he thought might interest me. Not only is there some good agriculture-related material, but it intersects a number of different interests on this blog. The book is actually in itself an interesting case to study from a historiographical point of view, which will be the subject of a separate post.
In his 1803 will, Edward Goat referred to the Royal Institution as the “New Society of Husbandry &c lately established in Albermarle Street”
Berman shows quite nicely that the foundation of the Royal Institution (RI) in 1799 was part and parcel of the late 18th-century enthusiasm for estate improvement and philanthropy. As he argues, “It is not customary to see the RI, the SBCP [Society for Bettering the Condition of the Poor, est. 1796], and the Board of Agriculture as a triad, but it was the same set of social and economic developments that brought them into being and gave them a similar, if not common agenda; and it was roughly the same group of men who sat on their governing boards” (2).
HSS Highlights November 24, 2009
Posted by Will Thomas in Uncategorized.Tags: Alex Csiszar, Graeme Gooday, John Murdoch, Martin Rudwick, Mary Morgan, Michael Barton, Michael Robinson, Milena Wazeck, Naomi Oreskes, Norton Wise, Robert Bud, Sharon Kingsland, William Newman
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Only a few cacti were seen in downtown Phoenix, and I am jealous of those who got a chance to get out of the city.
In the narrow space between my HSS trip, and an upcoming Thanksgiving trip, I wanted to quickly fit in a quick recap of some of the highlights of HSS.
Indiana University’s Bill Newman introduced the winner of this year’s lifetime-achievement Sarton Medal, John Murdoch. Murdoch works on medieval and ancient science in a history of philosophy vein. He came to Harvard in 1957, and when I was there (2002-07) his courses were of a rather different mode of pedagogy than the rest of the department. As a 20th-century historian, I didn’t know him very well personally, but it was good to see HSS sustaining its effort to recognize and promote intellectual and philosophical history, and to bring it back into the mainstream of what we do.
[Edit, October 2011: John Murdoch died in September 2010. An eloge written by Newman (paywall) appears in the September 2011 Isis.]
One of the big difficulties of keeping specialized intellectual history in the mainstream of a profession that has—rightly—branched out into cultural history, is how to make that work understandable and usable to those who aren’t intensively engaged with it. On this note, I was enthused to learn about Newman’s web project, “The Chymistry of Isaac Newton” (aka chymistry.org). (more…)
HET and Science Studies January 22, 2009
Posted by Will Thomas in Uncategorized.Tags: David Kaiser, Ivan Moscati, Mary Morgan, Philip Mirowski, Roy Weintraub, Wade Hands
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This post has a couple of motivations. I’ve been following with interest the conversations over at the History of Economics Playground about the relationship between the History of Economic Thought (HET) and the science studies disciplines (see here for instance). I’m particularly struck by the facts that many in the HET camp view the historical analysis of the impact of context as a distraction, and that eminent economists frequently show up to scold the rogues. This contrasts to the history of other scientific professions falling under the HSS umbrella, where intellectual interaction between historians and scientists is pretty much at a low ebb.
The second motivation is that I’m now pushing toward completion of my book manuscript on operations research and associated “policy sciences”. While sweeping up my chapter on the rise of OR and decision theory, I wanted to make sure there wasn’t anything pressing on Kenneth Arrow, (more…)
Ether Wave Propaganda 
The “MIT and the Transformation of American Economics” Conference and Maturation in the the Historiography of Economic Thought December 29, 2014
Posted by Will Thomas in Commentary Track, History of Economic Thought.Tags: Beatrice Cherrier, Deidre McCloskey, E. Roy Weintraub, James Poterba, Mary Morgan, Pedro Duarte, Peter Temin, Philip Mirowski, Roger Backhouse, S. M. Amadae, Wade Hands, Yann Giraud
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Paul Samuelson (1915–2009), doyen of MIT economics
I have a new article out, “Decisions and Dynamics: Postwar Theoretical Problems and the MIT Style of Economics,” in the 2014 annual supplement to History of Political Economy on MIT and the Transformation of American Economics. Following tradition, I’ll talk a little bit about the thinking behind the article in a separate post. However, I would like to start with a few words about the 2013 conference that the supplement was based on.
In short, it was almost certainly the best conference I have attended. To understand why, it will be useful to understand the peculiarities of the development of the field of the history of economic thought (HET), and how it seems to be reaching a new state of maturity.
For some time now HET has been having something of an identity crisis. Traditionally strongly affiliated with economics departments, HET, even more so than economic history, has had problems maintaining its status within the economics profession. Concurrently, HET has moved away methodologically from exegesis on the economic canon (“What did Smith/Keynes mean when they wrote X?”), and more toward something people working in the history of science would be familiar and comfortable with.
(more…)