Donald Winch

19 Jul

Obituary by Stefan Collini,
2017

The dogma of market fundamentalism that has swept the Anglo-American world in recent decades likes to claim Adam Smith as its intellectual godfather. But as Donald Winch, who has died aged 82, demonstrated, first in his 1978 book Adam Smith’s Politics and then in subsequent writings, this is an ideological appropriation of Smith’s name which misrepresents his purposes and his achievement. As Winch convincingly showed, far from recommending unrestricted laissez-faire, The Wealth of Nations analyzed the potentially damaging effects of market relations on civic virtue, emphasizing the ‘mental mutilation’ that factory labour can inflict, and even musing on the politically educative effects of a citizen militia. Smith was not endorsing an unrestrained individualism: rather, he was, along with figures such as his close friend David Hume, exploring the character of ‘commercial society’ as part of a wider enquiry into the nature of law and government in modern states. Winch’s revisionist account of Smith’s larger intellectual project was typical of the scrupulous, deeply-researched scholarship that led him to be recognized as one of the world’s leading intellectual historians of political economy. Having been educated at LSE and Princeton as an economist, Winch never lost his mastery of even the most technical aspects of economic theory. But he combined this with a subtle, very learned form of intellectual history which re-situated such theories in the thick texture of assumption and debate in which they were originally formed. In this way, he re-shaped our understanding of the part played by economic reasoning in British culture from the late 18th to the mid 20th century, along the way rescuing such figures as Smith, Malthus, Marshall, and Keynes from both their worshippers and their detractors. Winch grew up in south-west London, the only child of Sidney and Iris, who ran a greengrocer’s shop. After Sutton Grammar School, he went to LSE, graduating with a First in 1956, and then to Princeton to do his PhD, where he came within the ambit of Jacob Viner, one of the leading authorities on the history of economic thought. Winch’s first book, Classical Political Economy and Colonies (1965) already showed him beginning to question the present-minded version of history embedded in orthodox accounts of the development of economics.

After teaching for a year at Berkeley, he returned to the UK, first to a lectureship in economics at Edinburgh, and then in 1963 to the new University of Sussex, an institution with which his life was to be closely bound up thereafter. He became Professor of the History of Economic Thought in 1969, a post he held until his retirement in 2000. Winch possessed the energy and decisiveness, as well as public spirit, to take on major administrative roles, serving as (a very young) Dean of the School of Social Sciences from 1968 to 1974 and as Pro-Vice Chancellor (Arts) from 1986-89. His deeply-felt commitment to what he took to be the informing ideals of academic life together with his combative temperament meant he was not universally loved as a colleague, though no-one could doubt the sincerity and selflessness with which he fought his many battles. His own fearlessness on such occasions made him a formidable champion of fairness and high intellectual standards. For all his institutional contributions, Winch’s distinction was primarily intellectual. His early work focused on the intersection of the two topics named in the title of his second book, Economics and Policy (1969), which dealt with Keynesian-inspired policy-making in Britain and the USA in the 1930s. But after the great success of Adam Smith’s Politics, he increasingly engaged with a wider range of themes in intellectual history. Common interests and a shared antipathy to the anachronistic, celebratory histories of scholarly disciplines led him to join forces with John Burrow and me to write That Noble Science of Politics: A Study in Nineteenth-Century Intellectual History (1983), a book that was a testament to close friendship as well as intellectual collaboration. For a while, it became common to speak, with some exaggeration, of a ‘Sussex school of intellectual history’. But his two most substantial (and perhaps long-lasting) books were yet to come, the linked volumes Riches and Poverty: An Intellectual History of Political Economy in Britain, 1750-1834, published in 1996, and Wealth and Life: Essays on the Intellectual History of Political Economy in Britain 1848-1914, in 2009. These volumes displayed his masterly command of the political and intellectual contexts in which various forms of economic theory were articulated and applied. Written with his trademark clarity and penetration, Winch’s detailed work is now the unavoidable reference-point for anyone with a serious interest in understanding the economic thought of these periods. Though his published writing is measured and precise, Winch was a man of strong attachments and deep feelings, emotions sometimes masked from public view by a cultivated gruffness. As a friend - and he sustained numerous close friendships over many decades - he was wonderfully steadfast and unabashedly partisan, but also enormous fun. To sit up late over the whisky with him was a sure route to ever greater affection and admiration as well as to a terrible hangover. The object of one of his strongest passions, however, was the magnificent park-like garden of his house in Sussex that he developed with fine aesthetic sense and great practical skill. His responsiveness to nature expressed itself in surprising ways, including, perhaps, in his perception that environmental concerns were central to John Stuart Mill’s social thought. The quality and influence of Winch’s work was recognised by various honours. He was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 1986, serving as a Vice-President in 1993-4. He held many visiting appointments, including that of Carlyle Lecturer at Oxford in 1995. From 1971 he was also a notably active Publications Secretary of the Royal Economic Society, a role he occupied for, remarkably, 44 years, overseeing several outstanding editions of the collected works of major economists as well as establishing an online database of economists’ archives.

The Donald Winch Collection

Thousand Manuscripts Blog

Before and After Toynbee

The Winch-Forbes Exchange

Donald Winch was Professor Emeritus of Intellectual History at the University of Sussex and Honorary Professor at the University of St Andrews. His unpublished papers and personal library were kindly donated by the author to the Institute of Intellectual History.

The online Donald Winch Collection, hosted by the University of St Andrews, covers a remarkably wide area of research in intellectual history from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries.

Stefan Collini's BA Memorial

Memorials

Remembering Donald Winch
Everyone who has any knowledge of eighteenth-century political thought and political economy will have come across the work of Donald Winch, because of his classic books Adam Smith's Politics: An Essay in Historiographic Revision (1978) and Riches and Poverty: An Intellectual History of Political Economy in Britain, 1750-1834 (1996), covering authors from Mandeville and Hume to Rousseau and Smith and to Burke and Paine. Nineteenth-century scholars will equally be aware of Winch's work from early studies of Classical Political Economy and Colonies (1965) and later work on Malthus (1987), ranging from Bentham and Ricardo to Mill, Ruskin, Jevons and Marshal, epitomised by his brilliant last work Wealth and Life; Essays on the Intellectual History of Political Economy in Britain, 1848-1914 (2009). Students of twentieth-century economics may also have come across Winch through his writings about Keynes and about policy making, in books such as Economics and Policy: A Historical Study (1969) and (with Susan K. Howson) The Economic Advisory Council, 1930-1939: A Study in Economic Advice during Depression and Recovery (1976). Winch's work was remarkably wide-ranging and formidably learned.
Winch was born in 1935, read economics at the LSE and completed his PhD at Princeton in 1960, being supervised by the inspirational Jacob Viner. For three years, he was lecturer in economics at Edinburgh, between 1960 and 1963, before moving to the recently-founded University of Sussex, where he served for over fifty years, becoming Professor of the History of Economics (from 1969) and ultimately Emeritus Professor of Intellectual History (from 2006). At Sussex Winch was active in university administration, becoming dean of the School of Social Sciences (1968-1974) and Pro-Vice-Chancellor (1986-1989). Beyond the institution, he was publications secretary of the Royal Economic Society, from 1971 to 2016, and Vice-President of the British Academy (1993-1994), having been elected fellow in 1986. A combination of scholarship and service characterised Winch's entire life, underlining his willingness to be a team-player, and to contribute to the administration of higher education and that of the societies of which he was a member. All of this made Winch an invaluable member of faculty; he was dedicated, honest and wise.
Winch the man was still more memorable. My personal experience underlines this, and I need to explain my own fortunate connection with the person everyone called Donald. When I was completing a PhD on Jean-Baptiste Say's political economy under the supervision of the Cambridge historian Istvan Hont, a lectureship was advertised at the University of Sussex. It was 1993. Sussex wanted someone to undertake Winch's teaching as he had a two-year research fellowship at All Souls in Oxford. Normal institutions would have advertised a two-year post at most, but Winch did not believe that young academics should suffer with a potentially endless series of short-term appointments; he managed to get the lectureship made permanent at the outset. I replaced Winch's teaching for the next two years, which mainly entailed seminars and lectures on a third-year undergraduate course called Concepts, Methods and Values in the Social Sciences: Historical, an intellectual history course from Montesquieu to Weber. Winch was on leave and completing the book that became Riches and Poverty. Despite this, he spent an inordinate amount of time with his junior and very ignorant colleague, explaining everything from reading lists and marking to committee structures and the culture of the place.
By this time, Winch had moved from the Economics Subject Group to History and saw himself as an intellectual historian, alongside his great colleague John W. Burrow. The intellectual historians, now swollen with my own arrival and that of Brian Young, who was replacing Burrow, were largely independent of the historians. This mattered greatly to Winch, who saw intellectual history as an interdisciplinary endeavour and existing separately from the traditional tribes of British academe. As well as ensuring that I knew what I was doing in teaching and administration, Winch was still more concerned that I complete my own PhD and start to publish. The teaching load was so high that finishing the PhD took a further two years. During this time Winch acted as an ideal supervisor, reading draft after draft and providing extensive comments. When I returned to Cambridge at some point for a visit, I discovered that Winch had been writing to the faculty of History to ask why they had not been spending time pushing me to finish the thesis, in the same fashion that he was doing from the Sussex end? This underlined Winch's care and collegial concern. It never stopped. When the thesis finally became a book, I remember giving him over 500 manuscript pages on a Friday night and receiving them back on the following Monday morning with each and every page annotated, and a full report on the whole. I was fully aware by this time that I was getting support far beyond the norm for junior faculty and receiving it from a great man. Winch continued to comment on every single of writing I undertook between 1993 and the months before his death, always quickly, and always providing fulsome and especially useful advice.
There were many, many other recipients of Winch's generosity. Scholars working across the history of economics, political thought and economic history from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries were equally rewarded. Winch had a gift for friendship and for academic communication. When I finally left Sussex after twenty years as a member of faculty in intellectual history alongside Winch, he was the person that I missed more than any other. Seeing intellectual history at Sussex crumble was difficult for Winch, because he had spent so much of his career sustaining the field in his home institution. The same could be said for the decline of the history of economics, in which field he had spent the first half of his career and in which he remained singularly prominent. Yet there was no anger or remorse. Winch, as I've written above, had wisdom in spades. Nothing shocked him, he was a rock of a human being, and took both success and failure phlegmatically. One of his great insights into the work of Adam Smith was to describe a powerful opposition both to enthusiasts and projectors, those who believed the world could easily be improved, or were convinced that if only a particular reform was embraced or law enacted the social world could be perfected. Smith, as described by Winch, was a spokesman for the wisdom of Solon, accepting existence in a world of the second-best and that in consequence indirect or piece-meal reform was likely to be the best option for flawed humanity. Winch's description of Smith could be applied to himself. He had a rare gift for seeing the practical consequences of human action, and for steering academic ships in particular. Everything he did was done by the book. Like Smith he despised corruption, placemen and sinister interests. The cliché for once is correct; we certainly won't see his like again.
Richard Whatmore
A version of this piece appeared as ‘A note on Donald Winch’, Revue d’histoire de la pensée économique, 5/1 (2018), 19-22.
THE HISTORIAN OF ECONOMIC THOUGHT
I knew Donald from the early 1970s, since when we kept in pretty regular touch. He seemed fascinated and ever so slightly puzzled by my research for The Age of Atonement (1988), but he was enormously encouraging and wrote references at crucial junctures, for which I was and remain enormously grateful. I probably spent less clock time in his company than many others here today, but in respect of quality time I feel myself to have been thoroughly enriched. To say that he was someone whom one might not meet for months or even a year and yet pick up where one had left off would be true but trite, since the same might apply to many other acquaintances. 'Picking up' is simply part of the dance to the music of time. My point is rather that, though I knew little about him in once sense—his marriage, family, pets, cars, favourite football team—I nevertheless felt intimate with him to an unusual extent. Admittedly it helped that the longest continuous period we spent in each other's company was in the late 1990s when we were members of a Liberty Fund colloquium at St Louis Missouri, and surprisingly (given that it was the Mid-West) we found ourselves the only participants who wanted to drink in the bar until well into the early hours. I was struck above all by his apparently total candour and lack of caginess, and this quality persisted. In my experience he never dissembled, yet I never found his directness remotely offensive. Soft of heart and sinewy of brain, he bore some resemblance to the Reverend Robert Malthus, whom he esteemed. When writing à trois he always seemed to me to resemble the fierce but above all shrewd and kindly Badger, alongside Stefan's knowing Ratty and John's intuitive (not to mention nostalgically burrowing) Mole.
Quite shortly before I first met Donald in the flesh, I came across his Economics and Policy (1969) which I used as a guide to teaching a paper on interwar Britain. I was far too inexpert in economic theory to offer a sophisticated critique, but it struck me somewhat negatively as being locked into a tunnelled vision all too common in the historiography of economic theory and policy, especially then. Having looked at it again recently I was struck—though not of course surprised—by its trenchant interpretations, its scrupulous scholarship, and characteristic delicacy of argument. Equally striking is a paragraph that jumps out at one as an adumbration of Donald's later writings, and in which he quotes Keynes's famous remark, 'If only Malthus, instead of Ricardo, had been the parent stem from which nineteenth-century economics proceeded, what a much wiser and richer place the world would be today!'[1] Here Keynes was regretting the dominance of a Ricardian tradition based on Say's Law, i.e. that supply created its own demand. It had led to a political economy of natural equilibrium, in which all the emphasis went into ensuring efficient supply side factors and correspondingly neglected the need to nurture consumer demand. In other words, it spawned policies that were good for the owners of the means of production, including capital, and neglectful of human needs, aspirations, and satisfactions. Donald did not go on to make a villain of Ricardo, far from it, but he did make a hero of Malthus and his sympathies generally lay with demand-side economics.
I do not think I was wrong to see the argument of Economics and Policy as a tunnelled or internalist one, or to regret that it did not factor in the many political and bureaucratic complexities that stood in the way of Keynesian solutions, not least the small size of the national budget. I also thought, and still think, that the argument was too binary, having been written on the premise that Keynes had been 'right' while Lionel Robbins and the Treasury were 'wrong', or still more reductively that Cambridge had been 'right' and the London School of Economics was 'wrong'. The final chapter, entitled 'The Keynesian Revolution: Fruition' includes the statement that 'obstacles' to the deployment of Keynesian policies to solve the deficiency of aggregate demand 'gradually have been overcome', especially in the United States. Of course, Donald was not to know that, with the Yom Kippur War just around the corner, the Keynesian fruit would fall off the branches pretty quickly. Moreover it must be said that his interpretation is never crude or unqualified, the Keynesian tone is commendatory rather than triumphalist, and the finesse in argument that characterised all his pronouncements both written and oral (and which I always felt was the more noticeable because it contradicted his slightly belligerent demeanour), that finesse is also present in the early book, but I do not think I am doing an injustice to the basic analysis when I say that it centres on a dialectical struggle that was wholly internal to the discipline and which led to what the nineteenth-century biologist Richard Owen might have termed a 'punctuated progression' in economic theory, whose midwife was Keynes.[2]
This being so, I think it was misleading of Donald to describe his version of the Keynesian revolution in that book as a Kuhnian paradigm shift, an idea then very fashionable in the history of science. That seems appropriate insofar as it was triggered by an observed fact (sustained mass unemployment) which could not be explained by Marshallian economic theory. But the term 'paradigm shift' also implies that one set of world views—philosophical, moral, scientific, and so forth—gave way to another. There certainly have been attempts to explain Keynesianism in such an overtly contextual way. Robert Skidelsky has examined paradigm-shifting influences such as George Moore's anti-idealism and the 'uncertainty principle', and Gertrude Himmelfarb more crudely has focused on Bloomsbury's anticipation of gay lib,3 but I do not detect anything like that in Donald's book, which was an essentially technical examination of economic expertise and policy. 'What unites economists today', he wrote in 1969, at the acme of the Keynesian consensus, 'is not so much allegiance to a particular paradigm or ideology as commitment to explicitness and rationality in the broadest sense'.[4] Yet if Donald had really been interested Kuhnian explanations, he would have presented explicitness and rationality as being themselves paradigmatic concepts. He did not do so because, for him, Keynesianism was a resolution of tensions within the discipline of economics.
In what follows I shall explore this theme of 'internalism' versus 'contextualism' because I think it helps to explain what made Donald's work so distinctive and so valuable.
In 1978, nine years after Economics and Policy, Donald published Adam Smith's Politics. It is too sophisticated and intricate a book to summarise, but in a nutshell Donald rejected as anachronistic what he called the common 'liberal capitalist' understanding of Adam Smith as the father of free trade and market economics. Mirroring instead contemporary discussion as to the relative roles of the 'general will' and the 'legislator' in Rousseau's Du contrat social, Donald emphasised the extent to which Smith did not expect the hidden hand of providence to operate optimally, and the extent to which he saw the need for intervention by a wise legislator. Donald's success in making this case may be judged by the indignation of the 'free market' and 'rational expectations' economist E.G. West, who complained that Donald had put Adam Smith into 'cold storage', meaning that he would no longer be 'useable' by those seeing to promote 'Thatcherite' economics' (to which some might respond, 'if only').5 More strikingly, however, Adam Smith's Politics seems conceptually to inhabit an entirely different mental world from that of Economics and Policy: not interwar Cambridge but the later twentieth-century Cambridge of 'Skinpoduncock'.[6] Interpretation no longer rested mainly on technical economic concepts like 'equilibrium', 'saving', and 'the multiplier', but related to a science of society based mainly on political categories such as 'republicanism', 'commonwealthmen', and 'sceptical whiggery', as well as on cultural and humanistic values like 'martial spirit', 'sweet commerce', 'civic virtue', and 'luxury'. Donald seems to have found this new contextual language liberating initially, but he soon came to see that it could become as much of a straitjacket as the technical language in which the history of economic thought was conventionally written.
“I would like to register a mild and probably vain protest against the tendency in intellectual history to arrange the various teams in terms of exhaustive binary choices. It was to escape the tyranny of the Tory/Whig dualism that Duncan Forbes invented the idea of "sceptical Whiggism". Among the dualisms currently being applied to eighteenth-century political thinking that are in danger of becoming tyrannical are the following: natural jurisprudence versus civic humanism, liberalism versus classical republicanism, homo oeconomicus versus homo civicus.”[7]
He was also concerned that contextualism, for all its possibilities, could morph into what was fashionably called 'the linguistic turn', which in turn could spill over into a post-modern preoccupation with the death of the author.
“I subscribe to a humanist position which believes in the existence of authors as well as texts and discursive practices—authors who were capable of forming and sometimes succeeding in carrying out their intentions when writing. They did so with more or less success because, like ourselves, their language and logic was more or less adequate to the tasks they undertook.”[8]
Donald was to remain committed to contextualism, but his focus would be much less on discourse and language than on argumentation.
More or less everything Donald wrote after 1978 was an exploration of how political and economic thought developed from Smith to Keynes, but if that implies a journey it was a most meandering one for there was no longer any hint of 'presentism' in his exposition. Indeed, far from wanting to put Smith into the cold storage of a categorical dualism, his aim was to resuscitate him by 'locating' him 'on an eighteenth-century map'. His favourite metaphor to describe his own scholarly activity was henceforth that of travelling through a landscape. He writes again and again about 'intellectual traffic', about 'bridges' and whether they have the load-bearing capacity to bear the weight of different arguments, about acts of trespass, fault-lines, seams, and crevices. Another favourite metaphor is fluvial. He explains, for example, how the stream of economic thought 'bifurcated' into Malthusian and Ricardian branches before joining together in John Stuart Mill. He wants to know as he passes from place to place 'how the natives saw and did things', and to 'discern features of the landscape' that were not perceptible to them. John Burrow coined a favourite metaphor about 'eavesdropping on conversations' to describe the Burrinchini approach, but Donald was not much of an eavesdropper. He wanted to join in the fray, even to berate, and occasionally stop for a bit of a brawl, on the grounds that debates and quarrels 'often resemble conversations in having more than two sides; in allowing the speakers to change sides, and in permitting them sometimes to occupy all positions according to occasion and mood'.[9] I dwell on these matters of style partly because I think they are unique to his account of the history of economic thought, and more defensively because the content of his arguments is far too complex, fine-grained, and subtle to be summarised glibly.
As stated above, Donald was a committed contextualist, but one whose focus was on argument rather than on rhetorical tropes and strategies, the most fundamental argument being over 'the binary line' between 'supply side' and 'demand side' economics in the long nineteenth century.[10] Accordingly he never wholly disengaged from those historians of economics who wrote about the subject in a more conventional or internalist way, though not all of the latter appreciated that this was the case. On the principle that a good way of explaining what somebody was about is to look at what antagonists mistakenly thought he was about, I refer to a bitter not to say jaundiced 20,000-word 'review' of Donald's oeuvre by Gregory Moore, an economically-trained historian of economic thought who writes with a modicum of sarcastic wit and a great deal more animus. He concludes his diatribe with ten negative strictures against Donald, and against the so-called 'Sussex School' in general. In my opinion they are mostly too trivial and too lacking in insight to waste much time on, but it may be helpful to dwell on his ninth indictment, which refers over and again to what he thinks is the Sussex sin of 'contextualism'.
“The ninth principle is the Sussex tendency to cut horizontal, rather than vertical slices, through history. This stance is adopted, in part, because historians who take vertical slices are often … induced to write teleological histories on single themes, usually about discipline A from great mind X through to great mind Z. With a horizontal slice, by contrast, historians are better able [according to the Sussex orthodoxy] to reconstruct and excavate the idioms and preoccupations of a particular historical context.”[11]
It follows, according to Moore, that contextualist historians feel they can relate a subject of study such as economics “to the politics, philosophy, science and religion of a period, [and] to traverse all disciplines with equal ease in a 'Renaissance man' fashion, an Historian of ideas proper rather than a mere historian of economic ideas, or medical ideas, or scientific ideas.”[12]
Descending to absurdity, Moore even complains that their horizontal contextualism gives the Sussex historians an unfair advantage over social scientists when it comes to achieving 'literary elegance and sustained narrative rhythm'.[13]
Moore's manifest defensiveness clearly springs from a sense that he and other internalist historians of economic thought are being targeted, at least implicitly, as 'mere' teleologists. He seems to have been narked by Donald's statement that he (Donald) was no longer 'a doctrinal historian of economic thought writing for fellow economists'. He (Gregory) may even have seen the comment as a sort of trahison des clercs. Elsewhere Donald conceives of his two major books as 'intellectual rather than doctrinal history', and no doubt this claim too will have roused Moore's indignation. Unfortunately that indignation has impaired his judgment, as I found when wading through his article and came across the following statements:
“Winch is doing for the late nineteenth century what Leslie Stephen (1876) and Jacob Viner did for the eighteenth century, and what Boyd Hilton (1988), Anthony Waterman (1991) and Winch (1996) himself did for the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century: he has made man's understanding of God important in the shaping of political economy.”[14]
There is nothing like seeing one's own name in print to concentrate the mind. It struck me at once that this interpretation of Donald's scholarship is grotesquely erroneous. Viner and I are guilty of the sin of contextualism as charged, but this was not what either Winch or Burrini were about, and it causes me a pang to admit that I might not have fully realised how much this was not what they were about had I not stumbled across Moore's mischief-making caricature. That Donald was emphatically not 'doing' what Moore alleges is evident from a passage in Riches and Poverty where Donald, despite inserting a summary paragraph or two on Christian political economy, states that he will leave the topic to 'scholars whose understanding of the nuances of theological debate, and of the associated religious and political alignments, exceeds anything I could hope to achieve'.[15] There was an element of false modesty in this statement, and it may also have reflected a temperamental uneasiness in matters of religion,16 but it was also a statement of methodological preference. At any rate, while Donald was always immensely supportive of and encouraging about my own work, and Waterman's, and also one might add that of Brian Young, Knud Haakonssen, and other historians of religious ideas, his own project was different.
Besides religion, natural philosophy has provided the horizontal slicer with most scope for contextualizing. A good example would be Philip Mirowski's work on Jevons, in which he claims that 'neoclassical economic theory was appropriated wholesale from mid-nineteenth century physics; utility was redefined so as to be identical with energy', and economic transfers were treated as energy transfers, likewise capable of being analysed mathematically. Despite the term 'appropriated wholesale', Mirowski does not mean that neoclassical economists consciously extrapolated from thermodynamics but rather that, by taking energetics as a metaphor, they 'surreptitiously' assumed (without necessarily understanding) certain of its basic concepts.[17] There is a Kuhnian aspect to this approach, and it might also be identified as an example of Moore's unfriendly term 'horizontal slicing', but Donald was much more interested in argument and engagement than he was in metaphor and intuition. In the same spirit one could contrast Donald's approach to Marshall in Wealth and Life with that of Simon Cook's recent monograph simply by looking at their respective indexes. Donald has 'Marshall and Mill', 'Marshall and … [a score of other named economists]', 'Marshall and … effective demand, … marginal utility, … unearned increment, … maximum satisfaction, … increasing and decreasing returns, … wants versus activities'; whereas Cook's index lists 'Marshall and Sidgwick', 'Marshall and … [a score of other named philosophers]', 'Marshall and … altruism, … idealism, … incarnational theology, … the mechanical model of volition, … paganism, … physiological determinism, … psychology, … self-consciousness, … social philosophy, … thermodynamics, … theories of language'.[18] Both Cook and Winch are very fine historians, and it is not a question of one approach being superior to the other. The important point is that they are strikingly different.
To establish how different, consider a would-be savage review of Cook's book that makes Greg Moore's essay on Winch look like a paean of praise. Peter Groenewegen is an internalist historian of economic thought and writes, like Moore, from Australia. He is the biographer of and a leading authority on Marshall, and he has evidently been rattled by Cook's monograph. All that need be recorded here is his conclusion: 'This cannot be described as a worthwhile book'.[19] Much more interesting is an adjudication by Carlo Cristiano who, though not uncritical, hails Cook's study as 'indisputably important'.
“Cook's essay certainly presents itself as an innovative contribution in the context of recent Marshallian scholarship. In place of the well known utilitarian and evolutionary premises of Marshall's economics, the reader will find that what takes centre stage in this book is an explanation of how and why an idealistic philosophy, rooted in the thought of Coleridge, Maurice and Hegel, lay behind Marshall's economic science. No surprise, therefore, if such a book should have some disorientating effect, especially on Marshall scholars. Nonetheless, this should not be an impediment to reading it with interest and attention. A preliminary point to be made, and one that Cook makes clear in his introduction, is that this essay certainly has to do with economics but is not, properly speaking, a book on the history of economics. Cook's objective is not to provide a new key to Marshall's economic analysis by looking retrospectively at its philosophical foundations. Accordingly, he does not set the various sources from which these foundations can be derived in any predetermined scale of importance. Rather, working the other way round, the method adopted by Cook is genealogical, and consists of a contextual reading of published and unpublished sources in which Marshall's ideas are considered as a consequence—and are approached from the point of view—of previous and coeval intellectual traditions. Within this contextual reading, economics in general and Marshall's economics in particular appears inevitably different from today's economics and independent from any idea of the way in which Marshall's thought may be relevant from the standpoint of an economist today.”[20]
It will at once be evident that such a defence could not and does not need to be made about Donald's Wealth and Life, which indisputably is a book on the history of economics, and is to that extent relevant to today's economists. If it seems to some like Greg Moore to be 'contextual' in the Simon Cook sense, that is simply because Donald's treatment of economic essentials is so much richer and more nuanced than is normal. So I am saying that in a sense Donald is there in the tunnel with the internalist historians, but his part of the tunnel is so much wider and more diversely furnished and inclusive than theirs tend to be. Stefan Collini has put the point well in a private communication regarding Donald's in-between position.
“I agree with you that Donald did not do 'horizontal slicing' if that means setting out to describe the thought of a period across many 'fields', but his chapters and essays are … not in any simple sense 'vertical' either. They are very detailed contextual studies around a given core; the core was some form of political economy, in the largest sense, but the method was to create a much thicker texture around the core figure… it always seemed to me that orthodox historians of economics remained a relevant set of antagonists for Donald. He sees himself as doing something different from them, but he still sees them as important interlocutors.”
As for the question of verticality and horizontality, Donald preferred to think of his approach as 'episodic'.
Finally and more speculatively, Donald's work, while in no sense teleological, seems to me to contain a notably positivist strand. His two great monographs, Riches and Poverty (1996) and Wealth and Life (2009), cover respectively the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. I detect a challenge in those two titles because the conventional view would be that in the earlier period, and especially in the eighteenth century, economic writers were concerned about happiness, the good, manners, politeness, sociability, and wellbeing— in other words LIFE—and that as political economy developed from (say) Ricardo onwards it became more utilitarian, more instrumental, more about poundsshillings- and-pence and income distribution. (A standard not to say stereotyped expression of this view goes something like this: 'We observe in the work of Malthus and Ricardo an emergence from the spacious Big Sky setting of Hume and Adam Smith into a narrowing intellectual terrain more nearly approximating contemporary [i.e. modern] economics.')[21] If this sequence is accepted, one might have expected Donald to employ the Wealth and Life title for the earlier period and Riches and Poverty for the later one, especially as linguistically the phrase 'wealth and life' is hardly resonant of mainstream economic thought in the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As though to prove that last point, Donald was forced to adapt the phrase from John Ruskin, who complained that political economy, far from leading to 'wealth', led to its opposite or 'illth'. Ruskin of course was representative of a continuous tradition of anti-political economy that stretched throughout Donald's two periods from Coleridge and Carlyle through Dickens and Ruskin to Leavis. Donald sometimes smote these romantics quite fiercely for creating a false impression that political economists were invariably utilitarian Gradgrinds who propagated a dismal and amoral science. Donald was fiercely protective of his political economists, even Ricardo, and I surmise that, by putting the Wealth and Life title rather surprisingly into the second of his two periods, 1848–1914, Donald was signalling that, in his opinion, as economics advanced at that time it actually became more humane, more socially responsible, more wise, in a way more professional, with more of a 'commitment to explicitness and rationality in the broadest sense' that he had commended when discussing Keynesianism in Economics and Policy—more than ever a 'noble science' alongside contemporary politics, in other words.
Donald was especially protective of Malthus who, on account of his emphasis on demography, was caricatured as an ecological fatalist and came under the greatest barrage of opprobrium. He also wrote with great sympathy about the efforts of other demand-side economists such as J.A. Hobson to develop a theory of 'economic humanism', yet he also recognised the illiberal and intolerant implications of idealism, and of basing a system of economics on what people ought to want rather than what they do want. In many ways his real hero was Alfred Marshall, whose ideas about the social possibilities of economic chivalry are made to bear a lot of the weight placed on an economics of 'wealth and life'. Distinctively, Donald refused to acknowledge that there was any tension between positivism and ethicism in Marshall's economics. In one of his most interesting passages he describes Marshall's excitement at the thought of the possibility of creating an economics based not on selfishness or competition but on 'the deliberate exercise of choice on the basis of careful analysis and forethought'; more specifically his hope that it might be possible by judicious state intervention in industry to finance welfare policies without resorting to revenue tariffs and so ditching free trade. Marshall also hoped it might be possible to create what he called 'consumer's surplus' by taxing the products of diminishing returns industries and subsidising those that enjoyed increasing returns. It was a concept that he 'considered to be of great potential importance to well-being … [and that] would enable the academic economist and the practical decision-maker to estimate the size of the gap between well-being and wealth produced by a wide range of policy choices'. Marshall then wisely realised (arguably unlike Keynes in the 1930s) that his wheeze would not work for practical and bureaucratic reasons, and set down to work things out again from scratch.[22] It is a small point but it illustrated what professional economists were trying to accomplish at one particular juncture. This was not a telos, but it did represent for Donald a high-water mark of pure economic theorising before party politics and ideology came along to render such purity all but impossible.
Notes:
1. J.M. Keynes, Essays in Biography (1933), reprinted in The Collected Writings of John Maynard Keynes, ed. Donald Moggridge and Austin Robinson (30 vols., Cambridge, 1971–89), xi. 100-101.
2. Since writing this appreciation I have learned that Donald himself was dissatisfied with Economics and Policy and for similar reasons.
3. Robert Skidelsky, John Maynard Keynes. Volume I: Hopes Betrayed 1883–1920 (1983), pp. 133-60; idem, 'The relevance of Keynes', Cambridge Journal of Economics, 35 (2011), 1-13; Gertrude Himmelfarb, 'From Clapham to Bloomsbury: a genealogy of morals', Commentary, 79 (February 1985), pp. 36-45, reprinted in Gertrude Himmelfarb, Marriage and Morals among the Victorians and Other Essays (1989), pp. 23-49.
4. Donald Winch, Economics and Policy: An Historical Survey (1969), p. 336.
5. Edwin G. West, Adam Smith into the Twenty-First Century (Cheltenham, 1996), p. 1.
6. This coinage represents my inelegant attempt to amalgamate the names of its leading gurus— Quentin Skinner, John Pocock, and John Dunn. Skinpoduncocky has an appropriately Fenland sound, just as the familiar use of 'Burrinchini' to denote John Burrow, Donald Winch, and Stefan Collini obviously evokes the hedonistic frivolities of Brighton.)
7. Donald Winch, Riches and Poverty: An Intellectual History of Political Economy in Britain, 1750— 1834 (Cambridge, 1996), pp. 28-9.
8. Winch, Riches and Poverty, p. 29. I would hazard that a similar point might be made about the direction of Quentin Skinner's travel from the 1980s.
9. Winch, Riches and Poverty, pp. 28-30 and passim.
10. Winch, Riches and Poverty, p. 26.
11. Gregory C.G. Moore, 'Placing Donald Winch in context: an essay on Wealth and Life, History of Economics Review, 52 (2010), [77-108] 94 (italics added).
12. Ibid., p. 79.
13. Ibid., p. 94.
14. Ibid., p. 98.
15. Winch, Riches and Poverty, p. 16.
16. A point touched on by Stefan Collini in his funerary address.
17. Philip Mirowski, 'Physics and the "marginalist revolution" ', Cambridge Journal of Economics, 8 (1984), 361-79; Boyd Hilton, The Age of Atonement: The Influence of Evangelicalism on Social and Economic Thought, 1785–1865 (Oxford, 1988), pp. 319-21.
18. Simon J. Cook, The Intellectual Foundations of Alfred Marshall's Economic Science: A Rounded Globe of Knowledge (Cambridge, 2009).
19. Peter Groenewegen in Journal of the History of Economic Thought, 33 (2009), 137-9.
20. Carlo Cristiano, https://www.disei.unifi.it/upload/sub/pubblicazioni/msb/vol.../cristianooncook11.pdf.
21. W.W. Rostow, Theorists of Economic Growth from Adam Smith to the Present (Oxford, 1990), p. 52.
22. Donald Winch, Wealth and Life: Essays on the Intellectual History of Political Economy in Britain, 1848— 1914 (Cambridge, 2009), pp. 271-82.
A Few Memories of Donald’s Early Life
Donald and I are very much products of our time. Our early childhoods were overshadowed by the war, his in London and the Lake District and mine in occupied Holland. This resulted in both of us growing close to our mothers, as the fathers were away on wartime duties. This closeness was to last all our lives. It also provided us with a background of optimism. Every year of growing up proved better than the year before. We believed Society would become fairer and more rewarding as we moved away from wartime restrictions and the Welfare State was created.
Donald`s family background was resolutely working class, with a steely determination to better themselves. His parents bought their first house in North Cheam when Donald was born, which was then a bold financial move. I remember the house as warm and welcoming, with an often used piano being the focal point.
We first met around the age of 13 at Sutton Grammar School. He got there by passing the 11 plus, I arrived two years later by dint of learning English quickly and getting on the right side of the History Master Mr Trubshaw. There was little remarkable about Donald`s early years at Sutton but arrival in the Lower Sixth saw him blossom. I particularly remember being rather jealous of his relationship with Mr Philips our Economics Master, who clearly saw in Donald a great deal more potential than he saw in me. I struggled to get a B+ while anything below A was a disappointment to Don.
In that final school year, two events drew us closer together. We were selected as principal singers in the school’s production of Gilbert and Sullivan`s “Iolanthe”, he as Earl Tolloler and myself as the Earl of Mountararat. This was a joint effort with Sutton High School for girls and the two of us took full advantage of our elevated position. The admiring glances of the Chorus of Fairies gave a great boost to our egos. Mind you that was 1952, long before sex was invented. It was also before popular television and we filled Sutton Public Hall for five full nights.
Our other joint venture was a summer trip to Holland, staying with various members of my extended family. In those days the women of Zeeland still worse national costume and the ritual dressing up with gold and coral necklaces and huge Brussels lace bonnets on Sunday morning for church fascinated Donald, as did the sight of men smoking cigars in church until the moment the Minister arrived. The highlight of the trip were visits to the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam and the Mauritshuis in The Hague. Rembrandt and Vermeer opened our eyes to a different world. It was noticeable even then that he was very comfortable in strange surroundings and had developed an inner confidence in his own judgement, unusual for his age. He could even stand accused of appearing stubborn at times!
In 1953 we went our separate ways. He to the LSE and greater academic glory and I to Manchester to study among the “dark satanic mills”. I was aware of his growing reputation as an Economic Historian but we only met occasionally during his professional career. I saw more of Don’s parents who moved to Lindfield in Sussex and bought a rundown greengrocery store. Sidney, Donald’s father, had worked at Covent Garden and made a real success of the new business by introducing aubergines and artichokes to the upwardly mobile residents of the area. It was to prove a sound financial move and eventually helped Donald in his purchase of the “Old Brewery” which was to become the family home. In recent years it has been a real pleasure to see him more often and to get to know Dolly, who has been such a support for him as he weakened physically. Only a month ago we had a genuinely fun day out in Brighton, lunching in the Japanese restaurant, at Don’s request.
Although we were all aware of the seriousness of Don`s condition, his death still came as a profound shock. It was a privilege to have known him