Who hold the copyright of Hutchison's correspondence?  Did he donate his papers?

RL

Terence Wilmot Hutchison's life spanned by far the greater part of the 20th century, a tumultuous century in the history of economic thought. 

At Cambridge in the 1930s he attended lectures by Keynes and was tutored by Joan Robinson. Provoked by Robbins's 1932 essay on economic methodology, he left England for Germany in order to read up on Robbins's references to the German literature and in 1938 - at only 26 years of age - he boldly published his critical response entitled The Significance and Basic Postulates of Economic Theory. 

Frank Knight in 1940 launched a scathing attack on this work - an attack that must have astonished the young Hutchison who was later to state that he 'drew more inspiration from Knight's Risk, Uncertainty and Profit than from any other work on economics' - arguing that Hutchison's essay heralded the introduction of positivism in economics. Later Fritz Machlup sought to present Hutchison's 1938 intervention as a form of ultra-empiricism. 

Although Hutchison's essay fell in the empiricist as opposed to the rationalist philosophical tradition, a careful reading of his essay shows that, contrary to Knight and Machlup, he did not hold an out-and-out extremist position. While influenced by the positivist philosophy of the time, he did not embrace it but instead used it (and other arguments) to deliver the most explicit and detailed criticism of the orthodox quasi-rationalist a priorist deductive method (as described by Robbins and especially by von Mises) yet seen in economics. 

His 1938 intervention re-asserted the empirical tradition in economics and attempted to outline the direction towards a broad 'empirical-inductive' approach, an approach that extended sympathy towards, but did not identify with, the historical and institutional schools. 

His 1938 methodological work was but the first of over ten major books - the most recent published in the year 2000! - and a host of book reviews and journal articles, many of which had to do with the history of economic thought than with economic methodology. 

Over the course of the 20th century Terence Hutchison left an indelible mark in both these fields, providing a rich and vital legacy for research in economics at the beginning of the 21st century. 

With the sad news of his passing, we mourn the loss of one of the great economists of the 20th century. 

John Hart 

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