------- Forwarded Message Follows ------- 
Date:          Fri, 17 Feb 1995 12:11:50 -0800 (PST) 
From:          [log in to unmask] Subject:       Welcome Aboard 
To:            HES <[log in to unmask]> 
Reply-to:      [log in to unmask] 
 
Hello to all -- its great to be on line.  I will be at Notre Dame 
and will be seeking to make some development of the project 
concerning the History of American Economics that Mary Morgan and I 
announced at the HES meeting at Babson.  We are still hoping to 
put together a conference on this topic -- maybe in 1997.  We have 
been discussing possible themes and have two possibilities: 
 
1)  The Transformation of American Economics: From Inter-War Pluralism 
to Formalized Neoclassicism; and 
 
2)  American Voices: Economic Discourse in America 1800-1950. 
 
The former is more focused.  We would be looking for studies of the 
character of inter-war American Economics (which we think was broad 
and encompassing of many differing viewpoints) and of how any why 
that situation became transformed in the post World-War II period. 
 
The other topic area is a much more general attempt to get people 
to think about the extent to which American Economics can be 
understood as an American Discourse, dealing with American concerns 
and addressed to other Americans.  This is not to claim that there is 
a distinctive American School of economics (although there have been 
a number of Schools or traditions of economics particularly associated 
with America from the Nationalist school to Institutionalism to Chicago) 
but it is to claim that an understanding of American Economics requires 
an understanding of its American context (particularly in terms of 
problems, policy, intellectual influences and so on).  That is, 
American Economics is not simply British economics writ small. 
Chamberlin is not simply Joan Robinson at a different Cambridge! 
 
I shall return to this theme again when more subscribers are on line, 
but those of you out there now please give me your thoughts. 
 
Malcolm Rutherford 
University of Victoria 
[log in to unmask]