Tribute to Mauro Boianovsky (1959-2024)

On February 21, Mauro Boianovsky passed away in Brasília at the age of 
64, after some months of illness. Within few hours the internet was full 
of reactions to the death notice, mourning the great, and in many cases 
unexpected, loss for the community of historians of economic thought. If 
he had lived to see the signs of appreciation from all over the world, 
Mauro would have found them remarkable with regard to the fact that he 
had been based in Brasília for most of his life – quite distant from the 
usual places of education, research and interaction in HET even now, but 
much farther away in terms of travel and communication at the beginning 
of his career.

Mauro took his first degree in economics at the Universidade de 
Brasíliain 1979. He completed his Master’s degree at the Pontifícia 
Universidade Católica (PUC) do Rio de Janeiro in 1989, after years of 
teaching at the Universidade Federal Fluminense across the bay. His 
Master’s thesis, supervised by Edward Amadeo, was the beginning of his 
life-long engagement with the theories of Knut Wicksell. As a Cambridge 
graduate student in the first half of the 1990s, Mauro worked on a 
doctoral thesis about Wicksell and contemporaneous business cycle 
theories, under the supervision of Geoff Harcourt. After earning his 
Ph.D. in 1996, he returned to the Universidade de Brasília, where he 
served as professor for the rest of his life.

Mauro was a prolific writer in the history of macroeconomics, in 
particular with regard to the evolution of monetary theory, business 
cycle theory and development economics. The publication record in his 
official CV comprises 80 articles in scientific journals plus many other 
publications, including five books that he co-authored, edited or 
co-edited. Most of this was based on detective work in the archives, in 
which he collected all sorts of materials as pieces of evidence on the 
formation and diffusion of the ideas, concepts and theories under 
scrutiny. Rearranging them like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle that could 
take unexpected shapes in the process, he filled gaps and established 
overlooked linkages in the history of macroeconomics. Over time Mauro 
became a master of rich contextualization.

While Wicksell remained the fixed star around which much of Mauro’s 
research evolved, he wrote copiously also about other economists and 
about the evolution of concepts. To name just a few of his favourite 
subjects, it may suffice to mention the names of Dennis Robertson, 
Ragnar Frisch, David Champernowne, Evsey Domar and Don Patinkin, the 
concepts of involuntary unemployment and natural rates of interest, and 
the making of Gottfried Haberler’s /Prosperity and Depression. /Around 
2005, Mauro began to work on the Latin American history of development 
economics, with a special focus on the contributions of Celso Furtado, 
but also in more comprehensive perspectives.

Coming from Brasília, Mauro needed to travel far and frequently for 
digging in the archives, attending conferences, and meeting with 
co-authors and other colleagues that invited him to their institutions. 
Quite aptly, he chose “Economists and their travels” as the topic for 
the presidential address that he delivered to the History of Economics 
Society in 2017. He had attended HES conferences since 1994 and served 
in various functions in that society, as described in his recollections 
published in the “HES at 50” issue of the /Journal of the History of 
Economic Thought /(February 2024). Mauro was also a regular participant 
in ESHET conferences and a member of the ESHET council from 2006 until 
2010. He supported the formation and activities of ALAHPE, the Latin 
American network of historians of economic thought, not least by 
providing an encouraging example of a successful career in the 
international HET community. He had friends all over the world and will 
be greatly missed.

Hans-Michael Trautwein

(This is just a short tribute; a longer obituary will be published in 
the April issue of EJHET)