HOPE Conference 2012, a pre-call for papers.
"The Economist as Public Intellectual."
Organized by Tiago Mata and Steven G. Medema

The annual HOPE conference for 2012 will take place in April of that
year at Duke University, Durham, NC. The conference fits within the
series of annual conferences that, starting in 1989, have addressed
topics in the intellectual and social history of political economy. As
in previous years the conference will be small in size and by
"invitation only", with only a small number of papers accepted from
the open call.

The 2012 Conference will examine how economists in the USA and the UK
have taken up the role of public intellectual during the twentieth
century.

The goal of the conference is to bring together a group of scholars
from various disciplines to examine the work of public intellectuals
drawn from the ranks of professional economics. In the tradition of
previous HOPE conferences, this gathering will pursue a social history
of the economics profession and an inquiry into the uses of
economics—here, the practice of economics in the "public sphere" and
the demand for the economist to provide public commentary on matters
economic and beyond.

The term "public intellectual" has come to denote those scholars who
address the educated public with analysis or deliberation over
questions of political or cultural concern. Economists organized
academically in the USA and UK at the turn of the twentieth century
and attempted to establish a self-image of detachment, but such
choices were not followed by some among their ranks. To name the best
known example, John Maynard Keynes had ahead of him in 1918 a
promising career of government employment and backstage influence over
British policy making. Still, he risked his reputation as an "expert"
in writing The Economic Consequences of the Peace and preserved,
complementarily and competitively, an engagement with the public. The
same can be said for later figures such as J. K. Galbraith and Milton
Friedman. The evidence of the success of economists acting as public
intellectuals while the academy and professional associations urged
the abandonment of partisanship and public engagement poses a paradox.

A concern of this conference is to investigate the paths of economists
and their close competitors in taking on the role of public
intellectuals and how these have translated into cultural and
political influence. Some of the authors who might be studied and
compared are: Henry George, Thorstein Veblen, Irving Fisher, J. M.
Keynes, Lionel Robbins, Walter Lippmann, F.A. Hayek, Milton Friedman,
J. K.Galbraith, Paul Samuelson, Paul Sweezy, Herbert Stein, Lester
Thurow, Noam Chomsky, George Schultz, and Gary Becker. We welcome
suggestions of others. Alternatively, one might consider a focus on
publications that have become synonymous of public intellectual work
and within which revealing comparisons might be found: Commentary,
Public Interest, National Review, New York Review of Books, London
Review of Books, Partisan Review, Nation, New Republic, New Statesman,
among others.

The conference will question how the definition of "public
intellectual" has been inflected by historical context. One might
divide this concern into two complementary themes. The first theme is
identity.

- How have economists made compatible their identities as academics
with their identity as public writers?
- How across time have they defined the identity of public intellectual?

The second theme is content.

- What were the causes of economists' public intellectual work?
- What resources, institutional and rhetoric, did they use in
producing public discourse?

While the first theme puts a spotlight on negotiations between peers,
the second highlights how the intellectual positioned himself in the
social and political domain. The history of economics in the twentieth
century offers a moving background on which these themes find multiple
resolutions, several aspects of which are important for our purposes:
the transformation of economics from a literary discipline to a
mathematical and statistical science; the consolation of some schools
of economic thought and doctrine and the demise of others; the
influence of the second world war and the expansion of universities;
the fortunes of social and economic policy in western States; the Cold
War; the labour movement and later social movements; the elevation of
economics in public discourse as a result economic events, such as the
Great Depression, the Arab Oil embargo and attendant recession and the
current economic crisis, and the increased public importance of
entities such as the President’s Council of Economic Advisors and the
Chairman of the Federal Reserve; and the expansion of the domain of
economics into other social science fields.

A call for papers will be issued in the early Winter of 2011 with more
formal instructions and information about the conference. We send this
pre-call to encourage authors to express their interest to the two
organizers and engage in a preliminary discussion of ideas for papers:
please email [log in to unmask] and/or [log in to unmask]