Aims of the lecture

• 1. To explain the main problems involved in establishing that economic ideas are the product of economists’ political values.

• 2. To explain the economic ideas associated with some of the leading universities and other organizations since the Second World War.

• 3. To explore examples of the links between economists’ political views and the institutions in which they are located.

Bibliography

R. E. Backhouse’s The Puzzle of Modern Economics: Science or Ideology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), chapter 8, provides a short introduction to the problem of ideology.

Although it contains a major chapter on “The Rediscovery of the Market”, which deals with economics, most of D. Rodgers’s Age of Fracture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011) is not about economics. The book is, nonetheless, very important because it documents how changes in attitudes towards individuals and society went far beyond economics. Economists were involved in the process but the breadth of the changes Rodgers writes about make it hard to believe that economists alone were responsible: it was a social change with much broader roots.

E. Schrecker’s No Ivory Tower: McCarthyism and the Universities (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986) is the classic work on McCarthyism and universities.

K. Phillips-Fein’s Invisible Hands: The Businessmen’s Crusade Against the New Deal (New York: Norton, 2009) discusses the hostility of many businessmen to the New Deal and the economic measures taken, rather than specifically to communism.

Useful references on the RAND Corporation include D. Jardini, Thinking Through the Cold War: RAND, National Security and Domestic Policy, 1945–1975 (2013), available online at www.smashwords.com, and A. Abella, Soldiers of Reason: The RAND Corporation and the Rise of the American Empire (Boston, MA: Mariner, 2009).

T. Mata’s “Migrations and Boundary Work: Harvard, Radical Economists, and the Committee on Political Discrimination”, Science in Context 22 (2009), 115, is one of the best analyses of radical economics around 1970. T. Mata’s “The Enemy Within: Academic Freedom in 1960s and 1970s American Social Sciences”, History of Political Economy 42 (2010), 77–104, follows this up by examining academic freedom cases in the same period.