DISTINGUISHED FELLOW ANNOUNCEMENT

Malcolm Rutherford of the University of Victoria is
the Distinguished Fellow of the History of Economics
Society, 2014.

There is no doubt that Malcolm Rutherford is the leading
scholar in the world on American Institutionalism, both
"old" and "new." His two books on the subject provide the
definitive studies: Institutions in Economics: The Old and
the New Institutionalism (Cambridge University Press, 1994)
and The Institutionalist Movement on American Economics,
1918-1947: Science and Social Control (CUP, 2011, awarded
the Best Monograph prize of the European Society for the
History of Economic Thought). In his early work, he broke
open the modern study of the "old" American Institutionalism,
beginning with his PhD (1979) on the school supervised by
Denis O'Brien at Durham and examined by Terence Hutchison.
During those early years of his scholarship, Malcolm completely
reformed our general understanding of Veblen, Commons and
Mitchell. But he also showed us how they, and a wider group
of American economists of the late 19th and early 20th centuries,
espoused an institution-based economics using historical kinds
of empirical materials conjoined to theorizing strengths that
created their analysis of institutions.

During the 1990s, Malcolm (together with Mary Morgan) created a
special interest group to push for more study of American
economics, an initiative that created their jointly edited
HOPE supplement, originally called The Transformation of American
Economics: From Interwar Pluralism to Post-War Neoclassicism
(Duke University Press cut the main title during copy-editing).
Malcolm's expertise on the history of American economics is
wide-ranging, running from the earliest days -- as evidenced
in his co-editorship (with Warren Samuels, Marianne Johnson,
Steven Medema, and William Barber) of a 15-volume series of
documents and texts in Early American Thought (Pickering &
Chatto, 2003-2004) -- to its recent history.

Malcolm is the quintessential assiduous archive historian,
interrupting his trips to archives only to collect photos of
the grave stones of dead economists. While archive work lies
at the base of Malcolm's work, and has led him to many new
findings, making new linkages and uncovering hidden connections,
it is in his writing that we find those other historical
virtues of making balanced judgements while still taking
radical positions. His scholarship on the history of institutional
economics has challenged widely-held beliefs about the history of
institutional economics in particular and of American economics in
general. Yet, he has characterized his own work as building on
and enhancing that which came before rather than as correcting
the wrong-headed thinking of previous generations of economists.

The combination of the breadth, depth, quality and impact of his
scholarly work, his unparalleled contributions to the Society,
and the scholarly values that his career evidences are reflective
of the best that the HES has to offer.

The Distinguished Fellows Committee:

Robert Dimand (chair)

Jerry Evensky

Philip Mirowski