------------ EH.NET BOOK REVIEW -------------- 
Published by EH.NET (April 2005) 
 
Donald Rutherford, editor, _The Biographical Dictionary of British  
Economists_. Bristol: Thoemmes Continuum, 2004. xxv + 1330 pp. (two  
volumes), =A3395/$650 (cloth), ISBN: 1-84371-030-7. 
 
Reviewed for EH.NET by Richard A. Kleer, Department of Economics,  
University of Regina. 
 
 
I confess to a broad sympathy with the dictionary's central aim: to  
afford "knowledge in context of economic writers." Like many other  
historians of economic thought, I was schooled to start right in on  
the core theoretical parts of the canonical works, measuring them  
against the standard of neoclassical economics. Only later did it  
dawn on me that acquaintance with a broad spectrum of contemporary  
literature could shed considerable light on _The Wealth of Nations_  
or _The Principles of Political Economy_. Passages that I had  
imagined to be driven by the disinterested pleasure of forging a  
coherent theory of value turned out to be speaking to pressing  
practical problems and to have levels of meaning of which I had been  
utterly ignorant. I hope the publication of this dictionary signals  
that other historians of economic ideas have had a similar experience  
and are keen to alert their students to the importance of reading the  
classic works in context. 
 
Unfortunately the contextual approach has been carried through only  
with varying success. The common run of article starts with a short  
biography, follows this with a chronological list of the individual's  
key writings (sometimes embellished here and there with biographical  
tidbits), and concludes with a short survey of the main ideas therein  
contained, selected and analyzed from the perspective of modern  
economic theory. An article of this type is only a modest improvement  
upon the standard fare in history of economics. And sometimes the end  
result is positively misleading. Many of the articles pertaining to  
the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries assume that an author's key  
"economic" works were motivated primarily by intellectual concerns  
and proceed on this basis to single out little bits of theory as the  
author's "aim" or "contribution." It is natural and easy to make this  
assumption. It requires long study to acquire the requisite degree of  
familiarity with contemporary intellectual, social and political  
trends that can alone open other interpretive doors. Specialists in  
the area will know that the "economic" works from these two centuries  
were often conceived and written as works of advocacy. Many were  
addressed to the concerns of a specific session of parliament.  
Leaders of the administration or opposition politicians used  
freelance writers to float ideas in advance of their campaigns for or  
against a particular statute or budgetary measure. Others, concerned  
only with their financial well-being, promulgated ideas for new  
revenue schemes, hoping for a lump-sum reward from the Treasury or  
better still to be hired to administer the new programs. Theoretical  
consistency was a minor concern for authors of this ilk. The  
contributor of the article on, say, Defoe, is well aware of these  
kinds of problems; others are not. 
 
One rung up the ladder are pieces like those on Keynes and Hayek, in  
which we are informed of the specific political and historical  
context in which the author's various writings appeared and how each  
work was received by contemporaries and helped or failed to alter the  
intellectual landscape. In fairness to the other contributors,  
however, it has always been easier to write good intellectual  
histories of early twentieth-century economists. We still share many  
of the same questions and concerns and so are not nearly so much at  
sea as we must be whenever starting in upon economic writers from  
earlier centuries. The highest praise must therefore be reserved for  
entries like the one on Mandeville. Here we see a contributor who has  
laboured long and hard to acquire a sophisticated grasp of the  
political, intellectual and ideological environment within which the  
_Fable of the Bees_ was first published and then steadily reworked.  
After just five short pages the reader comes to understand quite well  
how the work challenged orthodoxy and would have delighted or  
infuriated its readers. 
 
The dictionary contains some six hundred entries. Most are  
well-written. The editors have also exercised a firm hand. Specialist  
terminology has been kept to a minimum; first-year university  
students could easily read any given article with full comprehension  
and even with pleasure. And none of the contributors was given  
license to run amok; the longest article I spotted spans a mere eight  
pages. The contributors are a distinguished group and come from a  
healthy range of disciplines. But seldom is an article written by the  
leading authority on that particular individual. Specialists will  
therefore find small errors of fact scattered about. Fortunately for  
the normal run of reader, this isn't much of a problem. The  
dictionary will still serve its main purpose of interesting new  
scholars in a contextual approach to the history of economics and of  
providing a handy starting point for deeper investigations. 
 
Coverage is very complete for the period before the twentieth  
century. I couldn't think of a single seventeenth- or  
eighteenth-century figure who should have been included and wasn't.  
One can find articles even on obscure writers such as Asgill, Briscoe  
and Chamberlen, commonly known only to economic historians suffering  
like myself from a prurient interest in the ABCs of early English  
banking. All of the usual nineteenth-century suspects also seem to be  
present and accounted for -- though I shall leave the last word on  
that century to its own specialists. Conversely, of the vast set of  
persons who have practiced economics in Britain since it became an  
independent academic discipline, only a few receive their very own  
article. So were we interested in utter accuracy, the book should  
have been titled: _Biographical dictionary of those persons born or  
long resident in Britain who, during the period before economics was  
professionalized, once wrote something (however brief) that  
professional economists still read today (however infrequently) or  
who, after the discipline was professionalized, were very prominent  
professional economists and have already died_. Most will forgive the  
editors their shorter title, even though at some level we all know it  
constitutes false and misleading advertising. And the editors must be  
commended for including a very full range of dissenting economists in  
their list of "major" twentieth-century economists. 
 
There is, of course, the question whether it makes sense to publish a  
dictionary specifically upon British economists. Certainly the  
decision to include an entry on Marx speaks to this particular  
problem. The situation will improve with the publication of a  
parallel _Biographical Dictionary of American Economists_, due out  
from Thoemmes Continuum in 2006. (I hope the publisher will agree to  
include in that work an index of contributors, a feature lacking in  
the present dictionary.) But it might have made more sense to aim  
from the outset for the more ambitious undertaking of a biographical  
dictionary of modern economists. 
 
 
Richard A. Kleer is an associate professor of economics at the  
University of Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada. His article, "'The ruine  
of their Diana': Lowndes, Locke and the Bankers," appeared in the  
November 2004 issue of the _History of Political Economy_. At present  
he is working on a book-length study of English public finance during  
the Nine Years War of 1689-97, focusing on the recoinage of 1696. 
 
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