----------------- HES POSTING ----------------- [NOTE: The ANB puts one bio online per day. When I see ones regarding economists or historians of economics, I will try to post them (see their policy as stated at the end of the message). Others should feel free to do the same if they see a bio I don't! - RBE] American National Biography Online Spengler, Joseph John (19 Nov. 1902-2 Jan. 1991), economist and demographer, was born near Piqua, Ohio, the son of Joseph Otto Spengler and Philomena Schlosser, probably farmers. In 1927 he married Dorothy Marie Kress; they had no children. He received the A.B. in 1926, the M.A. in 1929, and the Ph.D. in economics in 1930, all from Ohio State University. His mentor at Ohio State was the well-known demographer Albert B. Wolfe. While a graduate student at Ohio State in 1927-1930, Spengler held instructorship appointments there. He was also a research fellow of the Brookings Institution in 1928. After a brief period on the faculty of the University of Arizona in 1930-1932 and 1933-1934, he joined the faculty of Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, in 1934, having spent a visiting year there in 1932-1933. He was a member of the Duke economics faculty for the remainder of his career. From 1955 on, he was a James B. Duke Professor. Although he retired in 1972, he continued an active scholarly life at Duke for another decade. Spengler's early interest in demography, as evidenced by his dissertation in the field, was maintained throughout his career. However, he never confined himself to that one field. In his first major work, France Faces Depopulation (1938), Spengler exhibited two professional interests in addition to the demographic--the history of thought and economic history--correlative interests that he would maintain throughout his career. Nevertheless, it was population problems that held center stage in that first major work. France Faces Depopulation argued that the recent history of French birth rates pointed to a significant future decline of the population with ominous implications for the future of France. In the 1930s a nation's military strength was often equated with the number of men of military-service age in the population. This, in turn, had important political implications for the nation's role in world affairs. As much as attention has been paid to population questions in the second half of the twentieth century by economists, in the period in which Spengler began his work in demography economists paid little attention to those questions. In his magisterial history of economic thought, written during and immediately after World War II, Joseph A. Schumpeter argued that major changes in economic theory around 1875, which decreased emphasis on long-run development of an economy and increased emphasis on short-run market effects, especially those coming from the buyers' side, led population economics to, as Schumpeter put it, "wilt." What Schumpeter did not foresee was that two areas of economics--economic growth and economic development--would become of major importance to the profession in the second half of the twentieth century. In both of these areas population change, either directly or as reflected in labor force change, was a key element. In addition, the explosive growth of population in the world after World War II focused attention on demography and on related policy questions. France Faces Depopulation was republished in 1979, forty-one years after its first publication, perhaps the ultimate accolade for a scholar's work. In 1940 Spengler published "Sociological Presuppositions of Economic Theory," an article that was a forerunner of still another lifelong interest--the philosophical and interdisciplinary aspects of economic thought. Four years after the publication of France Faces Depopulation, Spengler produced French Predecessors of Malthus (1942), a work that combined his interest in population problems with his interest in the history of economic ideas. There followed a brief fallow period of scholarly output; 1943 was the only year of his entire active career (1930-1980) when no scholarly publication by Spengler made an appearance. The reason for this was simple: he was engaged full time in 1942-1943 as regional price executive of Region 4 (Southeast U.S.) of the wartime Office of Price Administration. This experience seems to have reinforced his aversion to governmental bureaucracy and to bureaucrats generally. In 1948 Spengler published a striking article, "The Problem of Order in Economic Affairs," which had been his 1947 presidential address to the Southern Economic Association. It evinces Spengler's insistence on keeping firm contact with the real world of economic life while generalizing and theorizing about the social phenomenon that an economic system represents. In this respect, as in several others, he might be classified as an institutional economist but not one of a doctrinaire type. "The Problem of Order in Economic Affairs" is an example of Spengler's breadth of approach to large issues as well as to the erudition that illumined his papers written in this vein. The great challenge for the economic theorist is to provide an explanatory model of an economy in which the actions of millions of individuals result in an orderly production and exchange of goods and services. In the real world, each economic system, if it is to survive, must reconcile the autonomy of individuals with the necessity of their coordination in economic activity without significant interruption over time. Two general types predominate: the market economy and the state-directed economy. When Spengler wrote his presidential address in 1947, the contest between these two types, represented by the United States and the Soviet Union, was of worldwide importance. Spengler's article was a masterly exposition and evaluation of this contest, grounded in a remarkable survey of relevant economic and intellectual history. He headed the piece with an apt quotation from the philosopher A. N. Whitehead and then stated that "the problem of economic order is taking on the importance it had in classic Rome about the time Augustus substituted the principiate for the republic, and in Western Europe during the period of religious strife when Bodin [1530-1596] and others were searching for a means of unifying the community." Later, in speaking of the particularization of social science in the modern period, he said, "With the differentiation of social science and social scientists, particular hypothetical subrealms of being have fallen under the dominion of particular groups of social scientists who have been implicitly charged, somewhat after the manner of priesthoods in ancient Egypt, to make their respective hypothetical subrealms of being adequately represent the corresponding and referent real subrealms of being." Such seemingly casual but penetrating analogies are often found in Spengler's more philosophical writings. Spengler's analytical powers were truly impressive, at times approaching prescience. Speaking forty years before the Soviet Union began to crumble, he said in "Problem of Order" that "a centrally planned economy . . . almost certainly will neither maximize the rate of growth of per capita income nor bring about the particular kind of coordination most men want. For the entrepreneurial state lacks and probably will continue to lack the know-how, the moral integrity, the inventiveness, the capacity to give incentive, and the flexibility of economic behavior requisite in a dynamic world." These three broad themes--demography, the history of economics, and the relationship of economics to other disciplines (especially philosophy and sociology)--were pursued by Spengler throughout his long professional career. In a period in which the discipline of economics became increasingly specialized and more and more isolated from other related areas of study, Spengler refused to narrow his interests. One important lesson of his career is that diverse but wisely chosen areas of study can reinforce one another. Thus he demonstrated that all scholarly productivity gains need not require increasing scholarly specialization. Spengler's career was not a cloistered one. He was active in various professional organizations, a number of which honored him with an office or other distinction. He served as president not only of the Southern Economic Association (1947) but of the Population Association of America (1957), the American Economic Association (1965), and the Atlantic Economic Association (1976-1977) as well. His relationship with the History of Economics Society was a particularly close one; he was a founding member and a moving spirit in its birth in 1968. Later he served as its president and was honored as its distinguished fellow. He was also a key figure in the inauguration in 1968 of the History of Political Economy journal, published at Duke. These two initiatives revivified an important field of economics. Their continuing viability is testimony to the foresight of Spengler and a few colleagues at Duke. A particularly fitting honor was Spengler's election in 1954 to the American Philosophical Society because the breadth of his intellectual interests exemplified the aims of that organization. He was also a recipient of the society's John F. Lewis Award. In very different arenas, he was a fellow of both the American Statistical Association, a recognition of his contributions to the mathematics of population change, and the American Association of Arts and Sciences. Finally, his individualistic political stance was reflected in his membership in the Mt. Pellerin Society, a conservative, libertarian group. He died in Durham. In an assessment of Spengler's contribution for the American Philosophical Society, Allen Kelley, Spengler's colleague and close associate in his demographic work, said, "Professor Spengler's lifetime research program on the nexus of economics and demography represents his most important seminal contribution to the advancement of knowledge" (Kelley, p. 143). Spengler began his work in demography and economics when population questions were almost excluded from mainstream economics. More than anyone else of his generation of scholars, Spengler changed that situation. Indeed, at first he was almost alone in the endeavor, but Spengler never sought to march to someone else's drum. He possessed a kind of intellectual courage and independence rare in scholarly circles. Bibliography For additional information on Spengler, including a bibliography of his demographic and other publications for the period 1929-1971, see Robert S. Smith et al., eds., Population Economics: Selected Essays of Joseph J. Spengler (1972), pp. 515-28. His later articles are indexed in American Economic Association, Index of Economic Articles, annual volumes for 1972-1980 and 1982-1984. Two of Spengler's later works are Indian Economic Thought: Preface to Its History (1971) and Origins of Economic Thought and Justice (1980). Spengler's own estimate, made late in life, was that he had published more than 250 articles. An assessment of his contributions to the field of demography is Allen C. Kelley, Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 136 (1992): 142-47; a photograph accompanies this article. A similar assessment of Spengler's contributions to the history of economics is in Irving Sobel, "Joseph J. Spengler: The Institutionalist Approach to the History of Economics," in The Craft of the Historian of Economic Thought, ed. Warren J. Samuels (1983). An evaluation by a former student is that of Leonard Silk in the New York Times, 4 Jan. 1991. An obituary is in the New York Times, 3 Jan. 1991. Royall Brandis --------------------- Suggested citation: Royall Brandis. "Spengler, Joseph John"; http://www.anb.org/articles/14/14-01077.html American National Biography Online April 2001 Copyright Notice Permission is granted to make and distribute verbatim copies of the American National Biography of the Day and Sample Biographies provided that the following statement is preserved on all copies: From American National Biography, published by Oxford University Press, Inc., copyright 2000 American Council of Learned Societies. Further information is available at http://www.anb.org. ------------ FOOTER TO HES POSTING ------------ For information, send the message "info HES" to [log in to unmask]