Of course Mason is right: who would deny that leaving most of the funding for research into private hands brings results which in one way or another reflect the maxim: who pays the piper calls the tune? Dear Robert Dimand, this applies also to the funding for scarce reprints: have you noticed that the author most reprinted in the LSE series is a vulgar sycophant like Senior? Perhaps some Rockefeller money went into this? 

Giancarlo de Vivo


> Il giorno 19/giu/2017, alle ore 18:58, Mason Gaffney <[log in to unmask]> ha scritto:
> 
> Dear Rob et al.,
> 	Yes, I agree that any brief statement of a complex issue risks
> overstating OR UNDERSTATING its point. I only want to raise consciousness of
> how the tentacles of well-funded octopi may direct or misdirect the work of
> "objective, scientific" scholars.  At age 94, I speak from long experience,
> some of it published.
> 
> Mason
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Societies for the History of Economics [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On
> Behalf Of Rob Tye
> Sent: Sunday, June 18, 2017 1:56 AM
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Re: [SHOE] LSE series of reprints of scarce works on political
> economy
> 
> 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.
>