Donald Anthony Walker (Mar. 6, 1934-Jan. 17, 2023)
Donald A. (“Don”) Walker, a History of Economics Society Distinguished Fellow and past President of the Society, as well as a former editor of the Journal of the History of Economic Thought, passed away on January 17, 2023.
You can read an obituary penned by his daughter here.
The importance of Don’s contributions to our subject are nicely summarized in the Distinguished Fellow citation:
“Professor Donald Walker, Emeritus Professor at the Indiana University of Pennsylvania, has a distinguished record of scholarship, with more than 100 published items in the field of the history of economic thought. He is best known for his work on Leon Walras, first continuing the tradition of scholarship of William Jaffe and then challenging and developing the received view. His contributions in compiling and annotating a “Bibliography of the Writings of Leon Walras” (History of Political Economy, 1987), and in his two major books Walras’s Market Models (1996) and Walrasian Economics (2006) (both with Cambridge University Press) have added significantly to our understanding of Walras and of his work. Professor Walker was also instrumental in establishing the International Walras Society and served as its first President from 1997-2000. It is less well known, but equally relevant, that he has published an extensive body of work on American Institutionalism, including significant work on the enigmatic figure of Clarence Ayers; and has contributed to the broader literatures on contemporaries of Walras, namely: Edgeworth, Marshall and Pareto. His publication record is shared between an impressive collection of American and European journals. Professor Walker has an equally distinguished record of service to our field. He was President Elect of our Society in 1986-7 and President in 1987-8, during which time he established an annual conference volume Studies in the Perspectives on the History of Economic Thought. However his most lasting contribution to our Society is evidenced by the existence of our journal, the Journal of the History of Economic Thought (JHET). Professor Walker first developed its forerunner - the HES Bulletin - into a refereed journal, and then oversaw its transformation into a fully-fledged scholarly journal, JHET, serving as its editor for the first ten years:1989 to 1998. His efforts established our journal as a serious international periodical, and so helped the Society to widen its outlook beyond its North American base. It is with great pleasure that we name Donald Walker a Distinguished Fellow of the History of Economics Society.”
Don was not just the ‘editor’ of the Journal. He was also the production department, personally delivering the contents of each issue to the printer, and the shipping department—picking up the printed issues and seeing to their mailing to HES members—until the first JHET publishing contract was arranged (largely through his efforts) with Taylor and Francis not long before he stepped down as editor.
Steven G. Medema, Duke University
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Vincent J. Tarascio (Feb 5, 1930 – June 3, 2020)
The first president of the History of Economics Society, Vincent Tarascio, passed away peacefully at his home on June 3, 2020. Tarascio received his PhD at Rice University in 1966, and from 1964 through 2001 taught at the University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill. He taught the (in the 1960s and 1970s, required) graduate course on the History of Economic Thought as well as a graduate elective on the Methodology of Economics. He was a leading expert on the work of Vilfredo Pareto, publishing many articles as well as his book, based on his dissertation, Pareto’s Methodological Approach to Economics (1968). Tarascio served as President of the History of Economics Society in 1974-75 and for twenty eight years served as the editor of the Southern Economic Journal. He penned an autobiographical essay that appeared in the March 1999 issue of the Journal of the History of Economic Thought. JHET has made this article freely available: click here