IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/hop/hopeec/v45y2013i5p38-67.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Observers, Commentators, and Persuaders: British Interwar Economists as Public Intellectuals

Author

Listed:
  • Chris Godden

Abstract

Many interwar British economists actively engaged in public economic discourse. Any investigation into these popular economic writings forces the historian to appreciate the frailty, novelty, and, most importantly, sheer extent of the material available. Such popular (nonacademic) economic material captured much of the energy and immediacy of contemporary economic forces. This essay focuses on the role that such popular publications played in defining these economists as public intellectuals. Writing against a backdrop of mass unemployment and industrial transformation, many British economists brought the public to the fore of their discussions and adopted the roles of observers, commentators, and persuaders. As a consequence of this, the social purpose that underpinned the public pronouncements of this body of public (economic) intellectuals came to embody two interconnected themes: first, a desire to influence the economic behavior of society, and second, a defense of established economic doctrine against the attacks of spurious, ill-advised, pseudo-economic myths that festered within the public consciousness.

Suggested Citation

  • Chris Godden, 2013. "Observers, Commentators, and Persuaders: British Interwar Economists as Public Intellectuals," History of Political Economy, Duke University Press, vol. 45(5), pages 38-67, Supplemen.
    • Handle: RePEc:hop:hopeec:v:45:y:2013:i:5:p:38-67
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hope.dukejournals.org/content/45/suppl_1/38.full.pdf+html
    File Function: link to full text
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Pühringer, Stephan, 2016. "Still the queens of social sciences? (Post-)Crisis power balances of "public economists" in Germany," Working Paper Series Ök-22, Cusanus Hochschule für Gesellschaftsgestaltung, Institut für Ökonomie.
    2. Karl M. Beyer & Christian Grimm & Jakob Kapeller & Stephan Puehringer, 2017. "Der 'deutsche Sonderweg' im Fokus: Eine vergleichende Analyse der paradigmatischen Struktur und der politischen Orientierung der deutschen und US-amerikanischen Oekonomie (The 'German special path': A," ICAE Working Papers 71, Johannes Kepler University, Institute for Comprehensive Analysis of the Economy.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    public intellectual; Great Britain;

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:hop:hopeec:v:45:y:2013:i:5:p:38-67. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Center for the History of Political Economy Webmaster (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.dukeupress.edu/Catalog/ViewProduct.php?viewby=journal&productid=45614 .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.