Review Article: The Divided Legacy of Mancur Olson

Abstract

When Condorcet fell foul of the Jacobins in 1793, Robespierre said of him that he was a great mathematician in the eyes of men of letters, and a distinguished man of letters in the eyes of the mathematicians. It took two centuries for the first part of that vicious remark to be proved false and for Condorcet's true stature as a mathematician to be revealed. Soon after Mancur Olson died in February 1998, The Economist said aloud what many in academe had been muttering for years:

Had he lived, his theory of collective action might well have won him a Nobel prize in economics, though not a wholly uncontroversial one. Some economists viewed him as a one-idea thinker, and worse, they whispered, his idea had reverberated less loudly within economics than outside of it; for example, in political science. The charge would not have troubled Mr Olson for a moment. He was as disdainful of parochialism in the life of the mind as in the life of a nation.Keith Michael Baker, Condorcet: From Natural Philosophy to Social Mathematics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975), p. 383. ‘Obituary: Mancur Olson’, The Economist, 7 March 1998, p. 135.