The graduate students at the University of Manitoba had organised a 
grand conference on Marx with lavish funding. The keynote speaker was a 
famous author from the New School of Social Research and he was to get 
an honorarium of $3,000. Among the supporting cast of visiting speakers 
was Warren Samuels. He was to receive $500. Our keynote speaker 
delivered an ill-connected sequence of platitudes, evidently concocted 
on the flight from New York to Winnipeg.  Samuels, who never despised 
anyone merely because he was Canadian, gave us a carefully constructed 
paper, lucid, scholarly and relevant -- perhaps the best of the entire 
conference. His performance on that occasion was typical of him.

Anthony Waterman


On 18/08/2011 2:23 PM, Scott V Parris wrote:
> My appreciation of economics, no less than the history of economic thought,
> took a giant step forward when I first began to interact with Warren
> Samuels at the History of Economics Society meetings in 1991. Over the
> years it became abundantly clear that I would not adequately perform my job
> as economics editor at Cambridge University Press until I had found a
> substantive way to invite Warren to make a contribution to the economics
> list. It was the Press's good fortune to have Warren agree to revise a set
> of essays on the invisible hand for publication, ably aided by Marianne
> Johnson and William Perry. The essays will appear in September. I trust it
> will serve as a testament to Warren's enormous intellectual and analytical
> gifts that he shared so unstintingly.
>
> Scott Parris
> Senior Editor, Economics and Finance
> Cambridge University Press, New York
>
>
>
> From:	"Mr. e"<[log in to unmask]>
> To:	[log in to unmask]
> Date:	08/18/2011 12:45 PM
> Subject:	Re: [SHOE] RIP, Warren J. Samuels (1933-2011)
> Sent by:	Societies for the History of Economics<[log in to unmask]>
>
>
>
> The field of the history of economic thought has seen many leaders come and
> go, but few have become institutions … Warren Samuels was, is, and always
> will be an institution.  His breath of knowledge and his depth of heart
> have been an inspiration to those ever so many whom he encouraged and
> nurtured during his many years.  I count myself as blessed to have been in
> that number.
>
>                                 Jerry Evensky
>
> Jerry Evensky
> Professor of Economics
> Meredith Professor for Teaching Excellence
> Syracuse University
>
> From: Societies for the History of Economics [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On
> Behalf Of Ross Emmett
> Sent: Thursday, August 18, 2011 11:13 AM
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: [SHOE] RIP, Warren J. Samuels (1933-2011)
>
> Warren Samuels passed away yesterday at his home in Gainesville, Florida.
> Warren was an eminent historian of economic thought, whose work ranged
> across the field’s breadth. His first published works in the field were a
> pair of articles on the physiocratic system (published in the Quarterly
> Journal of Economics) that served to reshape thinking about the
> physiocratic view of the economic role of the state. On the other end of
> the time spectrum, he was a pioneer in doing and encouraging work on the
> history of post-war economics. This breadth of scholarship is exemplified
> nicely in the book that he completed not long before his death, Erasing the
> Invisible Hand: Essays on an Elusive and Misguided Concept in Economics,
> which was brought to completion with the assistance of Marianne Johnson and
> will be released by Cambridge University Press in September. We’ve suffered
> a great loss as an intellectual community in his passing.
>
> Many of you knew Warren well, so there is no need to rehearse at length his
> publications or his forays into many other areas of economics. Warren was
> one of the first historians of economics to treat the history of economics
> as a branch of intellectual history. This was, for him, a part of the
> larger intellectual conversation about the role of governments and markets
> in modern society that was his lifelong pursuit. His well-known studies of
> policy in classical economics (The Classical Theory of Economic Policy) and
> in Pareto (Pareto on Policy) were major contributions to that discussion.
> His perspective had a significant effect on the students who studied with
> him over the years, and on those of us who were the recipients of his
> comments and advice at conferences and via correspondence.
>
>  From the outset of his career, Warren recognized the importance to the
> intellectual historian of correspondence, course notes, unpublished
> manuscripts, public lectures, etc. What we now collectively refer to as
> archival materials. Not only did he promote the use of these materials in
> historical research, but he also amassed an extensive personal collection
> of these materials, which he began to publish in 1989 in archival
> supplements to Research in the History of Economic Thought&  Methodology.
> The very first supplement contained the notes he had obtained from
> economist Robert L. Hale and Sinologist Homer H. Dubs of John Dewey’s
> course on Moral and Political Philosophy at Columbia University. The second
> supplement contains the only authorized publication of Frank Knight’s
> infamous lecture on “The Case for Communism.” Warren and George Stigler
> went back and forth for some time regarding the publication of that piece!
> Dewey and Knight were, perhaps not surprisingly, two of Warren’s
> intellectual heros. The materials he amassed will continue to be published
> in the research annual for many years to come. His collection of
> photographs of economists is already available online from the Center for
> the History of Political Economy at Duke University.
>
> Warren was also a tireless editor of volumes that touched upon almost any
> aspect of his wider interests. I have lined up on my bookshelf over 80
> volumes that he edited on the history of economics, economic methodology,
> or recent economic thought. Mine is probably not a complete set! All of
> these were undertaken to encourage scholarship in areas that interested him
> (and, by extension, which he thought would interest others). Many of them
> are also the means by which he encouraged the work of young scholars.
>
> We all experienced his generosity to students, young scholars and anyone
> else who wanted to join the great conversation. His goal and passion was to
> broaden and enrich that conversation, and he was as happy to engage a young
> scholar as he was a Nobel laureate. To that end, he and Sylvia made a
> substantial contribution to the History of Economics Society to endow its
> Young Scholars program.
>
> Among the many professional societies to which he belonged, the History of
> Economics Society was always the one closest to Warren’s heart. He was a
> founding member of the Society, and served as its 8th President. The
> Society honored him in 1997 with its Distinguished Fellow award; two years
> earlier he was the recipient of the Association for Evolutionary Economics
> Veblen-Commons Award. He was the long-time editor of the Journal of
> Economic Issues and the founding editor of Research in the History of
> Economic Thought&  Methodology.
>
> I wish to acknowledge the helpful advice I received from Jeff Biddle,
> Marianne Johnson and Steve Medema.