Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-dlnhk Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-24T12:01:49.225Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

BORDER CROSSINGS

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 July 2019

Richard Adelstein
Richard Adelstein*
Affiliation:
Woodhouse/Sysco Professor of Economics, Wesleyan University, Middletown, CT06459, USA. [email protected].
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

I first met Bill Barber in 1975, when I came to interview for a position in economics at Wesleyan University, where Bill had taught for almost twenty years. I’d shown some interest in interdisciplinary work, so my hosts made sure my tour included the College of Social Studies, an unusually intensive undergraduate program that combined three years of close study in economics, government, history, and philosophy with a relentless regime of weekly essays and tutorial meetings. Bill had his office there, across the campus from the other economists, and taught half his courses in the college, which he’d helped to found. It was, my skeptical hosts cordially informed me, modeled on the way philosophy, politics, and economics were taught together at Oxford, and had little to do with "real" economics, the kind they did, with its high theory and, even then, its commitment to econometrics. As I soon learned, the college was the brainchild of a group of tweedy Oxonians with a mission: to teach these subjects together in a way that recognized the essential unity of the social sciences and history and, in the teaching of each, drew insights and context from all the others. This wasn’t how I’d been taught economics, or anything else. I knew nothing about Oxford, and next to nothing about history and philosophy. But in the two hours I spent that day at the College of Social Studies with Bill and his collaborators in the mission, all of them subjects of the same cordial skepticism in their own departments, I became one of them myself.

Type
Symposium in Memory of William J. Barber (1925–2016)
Information
Journal of the History of Economic Thought , Volume 41 , Issue 3 , September 2019 , pp. 319 - 323
Copyright
Copyright © The History of Economics Society 2019 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

I am grateful to Bill’s colleague and mine, Gil Skillman, for helpful comments and suggestions.

References

REFERENCES

Adelstein, Richard. 1991. “‘The Nation as an Economic Unit’: Keynes, Roosevelt, and the Managerial Ideal.” Journal of American History 78 (1): 160–187.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Barber, William J. 1961. The Economy of British Central Africa: A Case Study of Economic Development in a Dualistic Society. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.Google Scholar
Barber, William J. 1968. A History of Economic Thought. New York: Frederick A. Praeger.Google Scholar
Barber, William J. 1985. From New Era to New Deal: Herbert Hoover, the Economists, and American Economic Policy, 1921–1933. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Barber, William J, ed. 1988. Breaking the Academic Mould: Economists and American Higher Learning in the Nineteenth Century. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press.Google Scholar
Barber, William J. 1996. Designs within Disorder: Franklin D. Roosevelt, the Economists, and the Shaping of American Economic Policy, 1933–1945. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hawley, Ellis W. 1974. “Herbert Hoover, the Commerce Secretariat, and the Vision of an ‘Associative State,’ 1921–1928.” Journal of American History 61 (1): 116–140.CrossRefGoogle Scholar