2011 Distinguished Fellow of the History of Economics Society: E. Roy Weintraub

E. Roy Weintraub has been elected Distinguished Fellow of the History of Economics Society.

This is the Society's highest honor, recognizing a lifetime’s engagement with the subject, and is bestowed usually on one person each year. The list of fellows includes powerhouses in the field of economics, among them some names that are well known in our department (former department members Joseph Spengler and A. W. Coats, as well as Craufurd Goodwin) and some names that are well known to economists in general (Nobel Prize winners George Stigler and Friedrich von Hayek; Lionel Robbins, who coined the most common definition of economics; and Don Patinkin, who laid the groundwork for postwar monetary theory).

Weintraub’s election was announced at the 2011 meeting of the History of Economics Society (HES), held June 17-20 at the University of Notre Dame.

Originally a mathematician who only later in his career turned to history, Weintraub has investigated and documented the process by which economics became a mathematical science.

“Anyone writing on that subject owes a considerable debt to Professor Weintraub and bears an obligation to confront his views,” states the letter of nomination that was read aloud at the HES meeting. “More generally, he has promoted an awareness of, and fostered contact with, the larger social and intellectual context in which economics developed. Through his influence, historians of economics are now in closer contact with literary studies, science studies and the history of science. Taken together, his primary research and his influential historiographic approach constitute an exceptional lifetime achievement.”

The citation concludes that “few modern scholars in any university have traversed the terrain from mathematics via economics into the humanities, and contributed with such distinction as E. Roy Weintraub. Professor Weintraub is indeed ‘a genuine scholar to be cherished’ . . . a renaissance man, who sequentially reinvents his intellectual space and then makes others see it as his natural home.”

Perhaps his most important book is How Economics Became a Mathematical Science (2002), which won “Best Book” awards from both the HES and the European Society for the History of Economic Thought. In chapters examining pairings of mathematicians and economists, it reconstructed the interrelationship of those disciplines in the twentieth century. He is currently organizing a HOPE conference that will take place at Duke in 2013 on the history of MIT economics in the postwar period.

“I’m grateful to the Society not only for this recognition but for supporting work in the history of the discipline,” Weintraub said. “That the HES was created with involvement from people at Duke and was the first organization of its kind makes it particularly gratifying to be elected to such an honor. And now with the HOPE Center, Duke has an institutional framework to carry on the tradition.”

Founded in 1974, the History of Economics Society has committed itself to encouraging interest, fostering scholarship, and promoting discussion among scholars and professionals in the field of the history of economics. The Society’s journal, the Journal of the History of Economic Thought, is published by Cambridge University Press.


http://econ.duke.edu/news/archive/2011/06/23/weintraub-distinguished-fellow-of-the-history-of-economics-society