----------------- HES POSTING ----------------- G. M. Ambrosi wrote: > There was hardly an other academic British economist of Keynes' time > who personally surrounded himself with so many members of the > allegedly "despised group": Piero Sraffa, Erwin Rothbarth, Hans > Singer, and Edward Rosenbaum were mentioned in previous postings. > Richard Kahn had a prominent part ... I think, as a American Southerner for over thirty years now, that this is irrelevant to the issue of attitude. Our past here is one of many kindnessess of Southern whites to Southern blacks at the same time the laws were constructed and reconstructed to maintain white supremacy on the basis of the superiority, always understood and preached and orated and spoken at home, of the white race. (Cootzee's _Disgrace_, placed in South Africa, is only the most recent superb literary treatment of this phenomenon.) Today, as I look around at the still relative absence of women in highest levels of the economics profession, I hear the echos of a time past when female graduate students were asked about their seriousness for academic work if they were married, or planned children, questions asked of them by the most courtly and gentle and kind men who would have defended womenhood as they did mother and apple pie. In both cases the underlying set of attitudes is based on "difference". That attitude is one of "I am different from you" and that difference was, and of course still is, valorized. That is one of the issues that Marie Duggan put forward, and I think is worth attending to. Keynes's many acts of kindness, generousity, and saving help to endangered individuals, even to organized groups like those that promoted emigration of persecuted scholars in the mid to late 1930s, could have co-existed, and on the evidence did so co-exist, with attitudes that valorized superior-inferior, nonwhite-white, upper class-lower class, the male -female, etc. I read Reder to be using "ambivalent anti-semitism" as an imperfect way to characterize of those complex mismatches between what we today would call "prejudice" and what then was simply "how the world was organized". Nonetheless, just as today we do wish to say that white American Southerners were complicit in a society was unjust, and that did great damage, so too Keynes was, as were his "Mandarin" colleagues, part of, indeed leaders of, a racist colonialist society organized at least in part to promote the interests of white Englishmen. For historians of economics, I would have thought that this was a commonplace observation; we are historians after all. Of interest for us would be, I thought, to see how these complex matters played out in the texts that those writers constructed, and in the reconstructions of and ways they construed the texts that they read and understoood from the local and contingent contexts in which they, authors and readers, were jointly placed. It was out of those concerns that the mini-symposium (not conference, not book, just a set of a few connected papers in HOPE) was called. E. Roy Weintraub ------------ FOOTER TO HES POSTING ------------ For information, send the message "info HES" to [log in to unmask]