To conclude our week of award announcements, the History of Economics
Society is enormously pleased to reveal the winner of this year's
Distinguished Fellow Award.
The award committee, consisting of the Society's three past presidents
-- Marcel Boumans, Evelyn Forget and Mauro Boianovsky -- decided to
honor Keith Tribe as the 2022 HES Distinguished Fellow.
Below is a transcription of the nomination letter, submitted by Mary
Morgan and Steven Medema.
We are writing to nominate Keith Tribe as a Distinguished Fellow of the
History of Economics Society.
Tribe received his Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge in 1977,
working under the supervision of Maurice Dobb. Over the next twenty-five
years he occupied positions in sociology and economics at Keele
University, culminating in his appointment as Reader in Economics from
1995-2002. Over most of the last 20 years, Tribe has been an independent
scholar, supporting his research through work as a translator of texts
(about which more below), but maintaining a voluminous and highly
influential program of research in the history of economics.
Though Tribe has published numerous articles in a vast spectrum of
journals and edited collections over the years, his primary influence
has come via his books, including (to list just a subset) _Land, Labour
and Economic Discourse_ (Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978), _Governing
Economy. The Reformation of German Economic Discourse 1750-1840_
(Cambridge, 1988), _Strategies of Economic Order. German Economics
1750-1950_, (Cambridge, 1995), _Economic Careers. Economics and
Economists in Britain 1930-1970_ (Routledge, 1997), _The Economy of the
Word. Language, History, and Economics_ (Oxford, 2015), and
_Constructing Economic Science. The Invention of a Discipline 1850-1950_
(Oxford, 2021). What unites all of these volumes is a combination of
historiographic innovation and, because of that, a significant reshaping
of our understanding of key moments in the history of economics.
Reviewers have consistently praised the depth of his scholarship, the
innovative topics, and his clear but subtle analytical stance--all
qualities that make him a clear candidate for this honor. He is very
much an intellectual historian, but one whose work very much joins up
and integrates the humanities and the social sciences. That integration
works in several ways. First, he joins sociology with political economy,
and both of those with how language matters--not just in the historical
primary source writings _within_ those fields, but in writings _about_
those fields. He then takes this one step further to show to how serious
attention to language usages give us insight
into how those nascent social scientists understood the real
societies/economies of their periods.
Tribe's work is important in three domains that exhibit this range. The_
first_, which we see most clearly focussed in _Economy of the Word_
(2015), is the importance of language, for language is the means by
which ideas about the socio-economic-political world are expressed to
such an extent that without understanding the way those commentators
have used language, we cannot expect to understand what they were
saying. This may sound obvious but it was for a long time buried by
other historical fashions. Language was a key point in his first book,
titled _Land, __Labour and Economic Discourse_ (1978), in which the term
'discourse'--then hardly used--had a significance that has now become
lost.
Where many historians read earlier writers as engaged in projects that
imperfectly anticipated modern social science, Tribe identified a clear
divide between those seeing economic and social order as needing to be
imposed by the ruler, and those seeing it arising more naturally from
human interactions. This provides the _second_ theme in his writing. In
_Governing Economy_ (1988), Tribe turned specifically to Germany,
expanding his purview from focus on types of literature to the
institutions that sustained the 'science' of Cameralism. The
international flow of ideas, and the reception of French Physiocratic
ideas and Smith's _Wealth of Nations_ into Germany, showed again how
important language, and translation, were to local reception of those
ideas. This was shortly followed by _Strategies of Economic Order_
(1995) a series of essays showing the different ways in which German
politico-socio-economics, from the eighteenth century through the
National Socialists and postwar Ordo-liberals, had conceived the problem
of socio-economic order.
The _third_ theme of Tribe's scholarship is his great attention to the
working practices of his authors such as Marx and Walras, and the way
they used their sources. He used similar skills in looking at Max Weber,
clearly a key figure in his studies of German economics. Weber's
_Economy and Society_ was never finished, and earlier translations into
English had treated him as a comparative sociologist (whereas for his
contemporaries he was as much an economist), and used this presumption
to fill in the gaps in Weber's manuscript with other inserts to create a
continuous text. Tribe's new translation preserves the main features of
Weber's extraordinary text--including its many different ways of
breaking up the material into sub-paragraphs, the 'bolding' of certain
words, etc. Then, by extensive interpretive editorial inserts, Tribe
explains what Weber was trying to achieve in his writing practices. This
translation (which took many years) has the feeling of an archeological
reconstruction--an amazing piece of work, far more than simply a
translation. It offers completely new insight into Weber's work for
English readers and has been hailed by reviewers as an incredibly
important contribution to scholarship in its own right.
Tribe's most recent extensive research project is found in his recently
published _Constructing Economic Science_ (2022), which looks at the
history of the economics from the nineteenth into the current period,
using a comparative analysis of the UK with American and German
experiences. Tribe has long been a commentator on the history of German
economics, and this book provides a fundamentally new perspective on the
evolution of UK economics, building on an earlier and extensive set of
oral interviews (_Economic Careers_, 1997), and a long research
investment in tracing student numbers and institutional changes. This
remarkable volume challenges one of the central tenets of the
historiography of our field: the centrality of Cambridge economics in
the development of modern economic science.
In this rich agenda of scholarship, Tribe has, almost as a byline,
become a translator of very considerable note--a fact that should come
as no surprise given his detailed attention to matters of language and
its use. Tribe's some twenty volumes of translation include von Thünen's
_The Isolated State_ (part III) (Palgrave, 2009), Philippe Steiner's
_Emile Durkheim and the Birth of Economic Sociology_ (Princeton, 2011),
Max Weber's _Economy and Society: A New Translation_ (Harvard, 2019),
and Oudin-Bastide and Steiner's _Calculation and Morality_ (Oxford,
2019), the last of which was honored with the HES's Spengler Prize.
Through these translation efforts, Tribe has brought numerous important
works in and on the history of the social sciences to the attention of
English-language audiences.
Now, in new move, Tribe, as a research fellow at the University of
Tartu, is returning his focus to the agrarian issues that occupied him
at the start of his career. In the eighteenth century and for some time
into the nineteenth, agriculture dominated economic life and hence
conceptions of economic order, as the title of his first book makes
clear. His returning to these questions will surely result in another
impressive monograph based on innovative research. But there is no need
to wait on yet another pathbreaking contribution from Tribe to bestow
upon him an honor which his contributions to our subject so richly
merit. It is difficult to think of a scholar whose work makes him more
worthy of the HES Distinguished Fellow Award than Keith Tribe.
Previous award winners can be found on the HES website at:
https://historyofeconomics.org/awards-and-honors/distinguished-fellow/
--
Carlos Eduardo Suprinyak
Secretary, History of Economics Society
Associate Professor, The American University of Paris
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