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/