Dear Tiago,

Just a short remark about your proposal (avoiding to continue the line 
of crazy comments): do you intentionally restrict this topic to the 
Anglo-Saxon world?

Yours,
Aladar
2011.01.27. 23:35 keltezéssel, Tiago Mata írta:
> 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.
>