CFP: HOPE Conference 2012 - "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.

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, i.e. addressing the public with analysis or deliberation over
questions of political or cultural concern.

The "public intellectual" is a concept that evades definition as it
has been shared and disputed by historians, political scientists, and
sociologists, with contrasting approaches and interests. For the
purpose of our conference we use the concept of “public intellectual”
as a marker to investigate the strategies adopted by economists to
intervene in the “public sphere”. Our contention is that economists
have been a force in the dynamics of public debate along two
dimensions:

1. Economists have shaped the public's imagination of the economy, its
prospects, its history, its institutions.

2. Economists have transformed the public's conception of its
identity, as consumer, as investor, as taxpayer, as citizen.

While the first theme might lead us to engage with economic history
and policy history literatures, the second theme brings us closer to
the concerns of political sociology and social history.  All demand
careful study of individual cases of public intellectuals in economics
that pay attention to their biographies, their conceptions of the role
of the scholar in society, and to their interactions with the public.

The history of economics in the twentieth century offers a moving
background against which these subjects find multiple configurations,
several aspects of which are important for our purposes: the
transformation of economics from a literary discipline to a
mathematical and statistical science; the consolidation 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.

Some of the authors who might be studied as examples of “public
intellectuals” are: Henry George, Irving Fisher, J. M. Keynes, Lionel
Robbins, Walter Lippmann, F.A. Hayek, Milton Friedman, J. K.Galbraith,
Paul Samuelson, Paul Sweezy, Herbert Stein, Daniel Bell, 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.

We welcome submissions consistent with the above mentioned themes. All
proposals should be accompanied by an abstract of not more than one
page sent to [log in to unmask] and/or [log in to unmask] by
March 1st, 2011.