----------------- HES POSTING -----------------
G. M. Ambrosi wrote:
> There was hardly an other academic British economist of Keynes' time
> who personally surrounded himself with so many members of the
> allegedly "despised group": Piero Sraffa, Erwin Rothbarth, Hans
> Singer, and Edward Rosenbaum were mentioned in previous postings.
> Richard Kahn had a prominent part ...
I think, as a American Southerner for over thirty years now, that
this is irrelevant to the issue of attitude. Our past here is one of
many kindnessess of Southern whites to Southern blacks at the same
time the laws were constructed and reconstructed to maintain white
supremacy on the basis of the superiority, always understood and
preached and orated and spoken at home, of the white race. (Cootzee's
_Disgrace_, placed in South Africa, is only the most recent superb
literary treatment of this phenomenon.)
Today, as I look around at the still relative absence of women in
highest levels of the economics profession, I hear the echos of a
time past when female graduate students were asked about their
seriousness for academic work if they were married, or planned
children, questions asked of them by the most courtly and gentle and
kind men who would have defended womenhood as they did mother and
apple pie.
In both cases the underlying set of attitudes is based on
"difference". That attitude is one of "I am different from you" and
that difference was, and of course still is, valorized. That is one
of the issues that Marie Duggan put forward, and I think is worth
attending to.
Keynes's many acts of kindness, generousity, and saving help to
endangered individuals, even to organized groups like those that
promoted emigration of persecuted scholars in the mid to late 1930s,
could have co-existed, and on the evidence did so co-exist, with
attitudes that valorized superior-inferior, nonwhite-white, upper
class-lower class, the male -female, etc. I read Reder to be using
"ambivalent anti-semitism" as an imperfect way to characterize of
those complex mismatches between what we today would call "prejudice"
and what then was simply "how the world was organized".
Nonetheless, just as today we do wish to say that white American
Southerners were complicit in a society was unjust, and that did
great damage, so too Keynes was, as were his "Mandarin" colleagues,
part of, indeed leaders of, a racist colonialist society organized at
least in part to promote the interests of white Englishmen.
For historians of economics, I would have thought that this was a
commonplace observation; we are historians after all. Of interest for
us would be, I thought, to see how these complex matters played out
in the texts that those writers constructed, and in the
reconstructions of and ways they construed the texts that they read
and understoood from the local and contingent contexts in which they,
authors and readers, were jointly placed.
It was out of those concerns that the mini-symposium (not conference,
not book, just a set of a few connected papers in HOPE) was called.
E. Roy Weintraub
------------ FOOTER TO HES POSTING ------------
For information, send the message "info HES" to [log in to unmask]
|
