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[NOTE: The ANB puts one bio online per day. When I see ones regarding
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policy as stated at the end of the message). Others should feel free to do
the same if they see a bio I don't! - RBE]
American National Biography Online
Spengler, Joseph John (19 Nov. 1902-2 Jan. 1991), economist and
demographer, was born near Piqua, Ohio, the son of Joseph Otto Spengler and
Philomena Schlosser, probably farmers. In 1927 he married Dorothy Marie
Kress; they had no children. He received the A.B. in 1926, the M.A. in
1929, and the Ph.D. in economics in 1930, all from Ohio State University.
His mentor at Ohio State was the well-known demographer Albert B. Wolfe.
While a graduate student at Ohio State in 1927-1930, Spengler held
instructorship appointments there. He was also a research fellow of the
Brookings Institution in 1928. After a brief period on the faculty of the
University of Arizona in 1930-1932 and 1933-1934, he joined the faculty of
Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, in 1934, having spent a visiting
year there in 1932-1933. He was a member of the Duke economics faculty for
the remainder of his career. From 1955 on, he was a James B. Duke
Professor. Although he retired in 1972, he continued an active scholarly
life at Duke for another decade.
Spengler's early interest in demography, as evidenced by his dissertation
in the field, was maintained throughout his career. However, he never
confined himself to that one field. In his first major work, France Faces
Depopulation (1938), Spengler exhibited two professional interests in
addition to the demographic--the history of thought and economic
history--correlative interests that he would maintain throughout his
career. Nevertheless, it was population problems that held center stage in
that first major work. France Faces Depopulation argued that the recent
history of French birth rates pointed to a significant future decline of
the population with ominous implications for the future of France. In the
1930s a nation's military strength was often equated with the number of men
of military-service age in the population. This, in turn, had important
political implications for the nation's role in world affairs. As much as
attention has been paid to population questions in the second half of the
twentieth century by economists, in the period in which Spengler began his
work in demography economists paid little attention to those questions. In
his magisterial history of economic thought, written during and immediately
after World War II, Joseph A. Schumpeter argued that major changes in
economic theory around 1875, which decreased emphasis on long-run
development of an economy and increased emphasis on short-run market
effects, especially those coming from the buyers' side, led population
economics to, as Schumpeter put it, "wilt."
What Schumpeter did not foresee was that two areas of economics--economic
growth and economic development--would become of major importance to the
profession in the second half of the twentieth century. In both of these
areas population change, either directly or as reflected in labor force
change, was a key element. In addition, the explosive growth of population
in the world after World War II focused attention on demography and on
related policy questions. France Faces Depopulation was republished in
1979, forty-one years after its first publication, perhaps the ultimate
accolade for a scholar's work.
In 1940 Spengler published "Sociological Presuppositions of Economic
Theory," an article that was a forerunner of still another lifelong
interest--the philosophical and interdisciplinary aspects of economic
thought. Four years after the publication of France Faces Depopulation,
Spengler produced French Predecessors of Malthus (1942), a work that
combined his interest in population problems with his interest in the
history of economic ideas. There followed a brief fallow period of
scholarly output; 1943 was the only year of his entire active career
(1930-1980) when no scholarly publication by Spengler made an appearance.
The reason for this was simple: he was engaged full time in 1942-1943 as
regional price executive of Region 4 (Southeast U.S.) of the wartime Office
of Price Administration. This experience seems to have reinforced his
aversion to governmental bureaucracy and to bureaucrats generally.
In 1948 Spengler published a striking article, "The Problem of Order in
Economic Affairs," which had been his 1947 presidential address to the
Southern Economic Association. It evinces Spengler's insistence on keeping
firm contact with the real world of economic life while generalizing and
theorizing about the social phenomenon that an economic system represents.
In this respect, as in several others, he might be classified as an
institutional economist but not one of a doctrinaire type.
"The Problem of Order in Economic Affairs" is an example of Spengler's
breadth of approach to large issues as well as to the erudition that
illumined his papers written in this vein. The great challenge for the
economic theorist is to provide an explanatory model of an economy in which
the actions of millions of individuals result in an orderly production and
exchange of goods and services. In the real world, each economic system, if
it is to survive, must reconcile the autonomy of individuals with the
necessity of their coordination in economic activity without significant
interruption over time. Two general types predominate: the market economy
and the state-directed economy. When Spengler wrote his presidential
address in 1947, the contest between these two types, represented by the
United States and the Soviet Union, was of worldwide importance. Spengler's
article was a masterly exposition and evaluation of this contest, grounded
in a remarkable survey of relevant economic and intellectual history. He
headed the piece with an apt quotation from the philosopher A. N. Whitehead
and then stated that "the problem of economic order is taking on the
importance it had in classic Rome about the time Augustus substituted the
principiate for the republic, and in Western Europe during the period of
religious strife when Bodin [1530-1596] and others were searching for a
means of unifying the community."
Later, in speaking of the particularization of social science in the modern
period, he said, "With the differentiation of social science and social
scientists, particular hypothetical subrealms of being have fallen under
the dominion of particular groups of social scientists who have been
implicitly charged, somewhat after the manner of priesthoods in ancient
Egypt, to make their respective hypothetical subrealms of being adequately
represent the corresponding and referent real subrealms of being." Such
seemingly casual but penetrating analogies are often found in Spengler's
more philosophical writings.
Spengler's analytical powers were truly impressive, at times approaching prescience.
Speaking forty years before the Soviet Union began to crumble, he said in "Problem of
Order" that "a centrally planned economy . . . almost certainly will neither maximize the
rate of growth of per capita income nor bring about the particular kind of coordination
most men want. For the entrepreneurial state lacks and probably will continue to lack the
know-how, the moral integrity, the inventiveness, the capacity to give incentive, and the
flexibility of economic behavior requisite in a dynamic world."
These three broad themes--demography, the history of economics, and the relationship of
economics to other disciplines (especially philosophy and sociology)--were pursued by
Spengler throughout his long professional career. In a period in which the discipline of
economics became increasingly specialized and more and more isolated from other related
areas of study, Spengler refused to narrow his interests. One important lesson of his
career is
that diverse but wisely chosen areas of study can reinforce one another.
Thus he demonstrated that all scholarly productivity gains need not require
increasing scholarly specialization.
Spengler's career was not a cloistered one. He was active in various
professional organizations, a number of which honored him with an office or
other distinction. He served as president not only of the Southern Economic
Association (1947) but of the Population Association of America (1957), the
American Economic Association (1965), and the Atlantic Economic Association
(1976-1977) as well. His relationship with the History of Economics Society
was a particularly close one; he was a founding member and a moving spirit
in its birth in 1968. Later he served as its president and was honored as
its distinguished fellow. He was also a key figure in the inauguration in
1968 of the History of Political Economy journal, published at Duke. These
two initiatives revivified an important field of economics. Their
continuing viability is testimony to the foresight of Spengler and a few
colleagues at Duke.
A particularly fitting honor was Spengler's election in 1954 to the
American Philosophical Society because the breadth of his intellectual
interests exemplified the aims of that organization. He was also a
recipient of the society's John F. Lewis Award. In very different arenas,
he was a fellow of both the American Statistical Association, a recognition
of his contributions to
the mathematics of population change, and the American Association of Arts
and Sciences. Finally, his individualistic political stance was reflected
in his membership in the Mt. Pellerin Society, a conservative, libertarian
group. He died in Durham.
In an assessment of Spengler's contribution for the American Philosophical Society, Allen
Kelley, Spengler's colleague and close associate in his demographic work, said, "Professor
Spengler's lifetime research program on the nexus of economics and demography represents
his most important seminal contribution to the advancement of knowledge" (Kelley, p. 143).
Spengler began his work in demography and economics when population questions were almost
excluded from mainstream economics. More than anyone else of his generation of scholars,
Spengler changed that situation. Indeed, at first he was almost alone in the endeavor, but
Spengler never sought to march to someone else's drum. He possessed a kind of intellectual
courage and independence rare in scholarly circles.
Bibliography
For additional information on Spengler, including a bibliography of his
demographic and other publications for the period 1929-1971, see Robert S.
Smith et al., eds., Population Economics: Selected Essays of Joseph J.
Spengler (1972), pp. 515-28. His later articles are indexed in American
Economic Association, Index of Economic Articles, annual volumes for
1972-1980 and 1982-1984. Two of Spengler's later works are Indian Economic
Thought: Preface to
Its History (1971) and Origins of Economic Thought and Justice (1980).
Spengler's own estimate, made late in life, was that he had published more
than 250 articles. An assessment of his contributions to the field of
demography is Allen C. Kelley, Proceedings of the American Philosophical
Society 136 (1992): 142-47; a photograph accompanies this article. A
similar assessment of Spengler's contributions to the history of economics
is in Irving Sobel, "Joseph J. Spengler: The Institutionalist Approach to
the History of Economics," in The Craft of the Historian of Economic
Thought, ed. Warren J. Samuels (1983). An evaluation by a former student is
that of Leonard Silk in the New York Times, 4 Jan. 1991. An obituary is in
the New York Times, 3 Jan. 1991.
Royall Brandis
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Suggested citation:
Royall Brandis. "Spengler, Joseph John";
http://www.anb.org/articles/14/14-01077.html
American National Biography Online April 2001
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