=================== HES POSTING ================= During World War I, a number of faculty members at different institutions were fired for pacifist or otherwise "anti-American" views. Charles Beard, the political scientist/historian who pretty much defined the [incorrect] concept in American history of "economic interpretation" (and whose emphasis on Madison's Federalist X as the key to the Constitution is still used by NON-historians) quit Columbia University to spend the rest of his life on a farm, making his living by writing textbooks, because a colleague was fired for political reasons. I don't know if his colleague was an economist or not. Also, through most of the 20th century, nativism, anti-Catholicism, and anti-Semitism could be disguised easily as opposition to America's political enemies, and the anti-American ideologies that could creep in from abroad. Thus it might be difficult to separate censorship of ideological belief from discrimination against non-WASPs in the Academy. However, I would suspect that in the United States, at least, the censorship was more often polite and indirect rather than direct: what was an appropriate topic, vs. what was not -- the STRONG political/cultural viewpoint on a dichotomy between "socialistic" and "free," which made certain economic views simply not discussable because they were "unAmerican", shows up (I believe) in the narrowing of discussion of economic policy to what could be classified as "macroeconomics," and the further evisciating of formal theories of economic policy to Buchanan's narrow "everything is self-interest" formula. The result of the narrowing in America -- topics which "could not be discussed" -- was that many topics which really are economics "fled", so to speak, to anthropology and sociology and political science -- and history. The result is some very disjointed and confused thinking in the academy as a whole when it comes to these topics. But also -- throughout the social sciences in the post-World War II era, there was a desire to emphasize, discover, explain what was "American" -- Europe had clearly self-destructed -- what "saved" us? Hence, for example, the search for The Causes of Economic Growth -- if we could find the secret to Our Happiness and Prosperity, we could share it with the "underdeveloped" world. Whereas the focus in the social sciences before World War II had been adjusting to and benefiting from the rise in great institutions, the focus after World War II was on creating an ideology of the American economy that could not be called an ideology. The ideology of what was "natural". Sorry about all the run-on sentences ... rather out of it today and not at all sure about what I wrote, but what the heck -- throwing it in for the sake of discussion (rather goes with the common sense thread too, yes?) Mary Schweitzer, Assoc. Prof., Dept. of History, Villanova University (on medical leave since January 1995 with CFIDS) mailto:[log in to unmask] http://pw1.netcom.com/~schweit2/history.html The CFIDS/M.E. Information Page: http://www.cfids-me.org/ ============ FOOTER TO HES POSTING ============ For information, send the message "info HES" to [log in to unmask]