We welcome those engaged in historical research that entails use of the papers and correspondence of British and Irish economists over the period 1750 to 2000. This website has been designed to house a project to create and update an electronic version of a finding aid originally published in 1975 as Economists’ Papers 1750-1950; A Guide to Archive and other Manuscript Sources for the History of British and Irish Economic Thought. The objectives of the site are to:
• accommodate a downloadable version of the original guide
• facilitate revision of the entries on the basis of more up-to-date information
• extend the guide’s coverage to include economists who died after 1950
• enlist the support and gather information relevant to the project from archivists and other scholars
• enhance interest in the preservation of archive material that will be of value to future historians |
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Saving Them, by Iain McLean (Nuffield College, Oxford)
Duncan Black (1908-91) was as self-effacing in death as in life. His towering reputation in the US public choice community (hailed by Gordon Tullock as 'the father of us all') was scarcely matched elsewhere - an interesting exception being Italy. He was very proud of his election late in life to the Accademia dei Lincei and to a Senior Fellowship of the British Academy.
Nevertheless his self-perception was modest. In a 1974 letter to Sir Geoffrey Keynes asking about a putative common ancestor, Duncan Black described himself as 'an economist ..., not a very good one, I admit, and I wondered whether I might have some distant connection with your late distinguished brother'.
Like everyone else in social choice I admired his pioneering Theory of Committees and Elections (1958); knew some of the frustrating prehistory of that work, conceived as a 'pure science of Politics' while Black was fire watching in Warwick Castle during World War II; and particularly admired his discovery that the equally lonely Lewis Carroll (C. L. Dodgson) had had an insight into the fundamental paradoxes of social choice matched only by Condorcet. What Condorcet, Dodgson, and Black had in common was that almost nobody understood their great work when it appeared. My only personal encounter with Black was when he wrote to ask for no fewer than 12 copies of a working paper I had semi-published containing translations from Condorcet's extensive work in social choice. Read More... [PDF 20.8 KB] |
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