Dear Mason,

MG >  Please consider also the possibility that the Rocks financed LSE not
to promote Fabianism but to subvert it.  They were a shrewd and canny lot

I suspect you would agree that this brief statement risks overemphasising
the degree of intentionally involved?  What I seem to see is more like a
great deal of rather random surface activity, but with a constant underlying
attitudinal drift applied to it.

I think its worth my saying a little more - as a non-economist – because it
seems to me that most published work on the long term history of economics
is not and never has been done by economists – but rather by historians,
anthropologists and archaeologists.  And that the Rockefeller funding in the
1920’s (London from 1923, Paris from 1926 (?), New York about the same time
(?)) seems to me to be crucial to an understanding how Economic Departments
were bypassed, in leading the way to the somewhat centrally co-ordinated
historicist errors concerning economic history of the 1960’s (I am thinking
especially of the enormous and regrettable influence of historians Fernand
Braudel and Moses Finley).  

Just as I fail to find the history of economics being pursued within
academic Economics Departments, so too the history of this history seems to
be written by others.  I was particularly impressed by the early work of
Jeff Pooley (‘An Accident of Memory’) on the intellectual development of
Edward Shils, and the rather notorious Paul Lazarsfeld - but carried out
under the umbrella of Media Studies.  It seems particularly relevant here,
since Shils developed his intellectual stance in connection with
philosophical matters whilst at LSE, and seems a crucial figure as the baton
was passed from Rockefeller to Ford.

If there are insightful 20th century historiological sources I have
overlooked, I would be very please to get them

Robert Tye

PS I use “historicism” in the broad ‘Hegelian’ sense, of course.