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