An accessible account of the role of the modern university in the creation of economics
During the late nineteenth century concerns about international commercial rivalry were often expressed in terms of national provision for training and education, and the role of universities in such provision. It was in this context that the modern university discipline of economics emerged. The
first undergraduate economics program was inaugurated in Cambridge in 1903; but this was merely a starting point.
Constructing Economic Science charts the path through commercial education to the discipline of economics and the creation of an economics curriculum that could then be replicated around the world. Rather than describing this transition epistemologically, as a process of theoretical creation, Keith
Tribe shows how the new "science" of economics was primarily an institutional creation of the modern university. He demonstrates how finance, student numbers, curricula, teaching, new media, the demands of employment, and more broadly, the international perception that industrializing economies
required a technically-skilled workforce, all played their part in shaping economics as we know it today. This study explains the conditions originally shaping the science of economics, providing in turn a foundation for an understanding of the way in which this new language transformed public
policy.
Author(s): Keith Tribe
Series: Oxford Studies in the History of Economics
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Year: 2022
Language: English
Pages: 440
City: Oxford
Cover
Half-Title
Title
Copyright
Contents
Acknowledgements
Note to Readers
PART I: FROM PUBLIC KNOWLEDGE TO INSTITUTIONAL DISCOURSE
1. Discourse and Discipline
The Initial Framework
The Institutionalisation of Political Economy
2. Reconstructing the University: The German Model, the American Version of That Model, and the University of London
The ‘Idea of a University’
German Universities in the Nineteenth Century
The American University
The University of London
3. The Social Mediation of Economic Discourse
Societies and Associations
Popular Pedagogy and Self-Education
The University Extension Movement
Elementary Textbooks
Curriculum, Examinations, Employment
From Magazines and Periodicals to Academic Journals
PART II: THE CAMBRIDGE MOMENT
4. The Moral Sciences Tripos and Cambridge Political Economy
The Mathematical Tripos
The Organisation of the Moral Sciences Tripos
Marshall’s Lectures on Political Economy
Marshall’s Inaugural Lecture
Reorganising the Teaching of Political Economy
Appendix: Selected Graduates in Mathematics and in Moral Sciences
5. The Cambridge Tripos in Economic and Political Science: Structure and Outcome
Designing the Tripos
Marshall’s Plea: His Final Argument
The Committee Stage and Subsequent Dissent
The Inauguration of the Tripos
Student Performance
Some Conclusions from the Data
Appendix: The Tripos Data Set
6. What Is ‘Marshallianism’?
‘Jevonian Economics’
Marshall as Teacher
Pigou as Student of Marshall
Sydney Chapman as Student of Marshall
The Composition of Principles of Economics
The 1920s: Moving on from Marshall
PART III: ALTERNATIVE HISTORIES
7. Why Not Oxford?
The Oxford Examination System
The Intercollegiate and University Lecture Systems
Classics and History
Edgeworth as Oxford Professor
The Oxford Diploma in Economics and the PPE
8. The Unrealised Prospect of Historical Economics
William Ashley
Toynbee’s Lectures
Ashley’s Economic History
Ashley in Toronto and Harvard
The Tariff Controversy and Liberal Imperialism
William Cunningham’s Historical Economics
PART IV: COMMERCE AND ECONOMICS
9. Models for Commercial Education: The United States, France, and Germany
The View from the United States
French Commercial Education
German Commercial Education
10. Higher Commercial Education in Great Britain and Ireland: Late Start, Early Dissolution
The Birmingham Faculty of Commerce
The Manchester Faculty of Commerce
The Teaching of Commerce and Economics in Liverpool
Commerce in the University of Leeds
Commerce in Scotland and Ireland
11. Commerce and Economics at the London School of Economics
The Early History of the School
The London BSc (Econ)
The Creation of the BCom
Undergraduate Teaching during the 1920s
Robbins as Professor of Economics
Commerce and Economics during the 1930s
The Dundee School of Economics
12. The Scientisation of Economics
Allyn Young’s Inaugural Lecture
Lionel Robbins’s Inaugural Lecture
The Sources for and Structure of Robbins’s Teaching
The Nature and Significance of Economic Science
The Instrumentalisation of ‘Austrian Theory’ and Its Legacy
The British Textbook Literature
Graduate and Undergraduate Education: The United States and Britain
13. Concluding Remarks
Appendix
Bibliography
Index
