Introduction

Summary

Harry Johnson … bestrode our discipline like a Colossus.

A Nobel Prize? He was the people's choice within the profession. Though selection committees stress quantum innovations, sooner or later they would surely have rewarded the massive incremental and synthetic advancement of knowledge that Johnson achieved.

Tobin 1978, 443, 457

During the past two decades Harry Johnson … towered above the rank and file of economists, not only in contributions to international economics but more importantly … he stood large and alone among economists as a wide-ranging social critic who was constantly extending the boundaries of economics.

He more than anyone else took up the tremendous task of clearing the tangled thicket of half-truths in economics. A phrase from Saul Bellow tells it all, “ … to live, to breathe, to be, we must get clear of the rubbish and the cliches.”

Schultz, Harry G. Johnson Memorial Meeting, 3

Thus two Nobel laureates, James Tobin and T. W. Schultz, remembered Harry Johnson after his death in 1977. He was not the best known living Canadian-born economist; John Kenneth Galbraith occupied that position. But Harry, as he was known throughout the profession, was certainly the best known Canadian-citizen economist. Outside the profession, except in Canada and Great Britain, where he was a public intellectual, he was relatively unknown.

During his brief professional career, cut short by a stroke in 1973 and his death in 1977 just over two weeks before his 54th birthday, Harry Johnson played a dominant role in two areas of economics.