Back in 1997 I was invited to the Central Bank of Brazil to give a seminar on the plans for the European Monetary Union. Before I went to Brasília two colleagues urged me to go and see Mauro Boianovsky there – a young scholar who, like me, had a strong research interest in the economics of Knut Wicksell. I found it exotic that someone in such a remote place would specialise in Wicksell whose ideas did not receive much attention at the time, some years before macroeconomics took a “neo-Wicksellian” turn with Michael Woodford’s Interest and Prices (2003). I got nevertheless into contact with “Professor Mauro”, as my Brazilian hosts called him, and we agreed to meet in the restaurant Carpe Diem. True to the name of the place, though in stark contrast to its relaxed atmosphere, Mauro did not waste any time with introductory small-talk. He went right down to the matter and quizzed me about my views on particular details in Wicksell’s work. I was puzzled. Professor Mauro was obviously testing me to find out whether I was a serious scholar. I understood the reason for this only months later when he sent me copies of a manuscript handwritten by Wicksell that he had found in the Lund University Library. Mauro added that he had needed to build trust in me for proposing to collaborate on an article about the manuscript that he suspected to be of great importance – of which more below.
How did Mauro develop his interest in the ideas of Wicksell? He received his first degree in economics at the Universidade de Brasília in 1979 and completed his Master’s degree at the Pontifícia Universidade Católica (PUC) do Rio de Janeiro in 1989, after years of teaching at the Universidade Federal Fluminense across the Guanabara Bay. Mauro’s life-long engagement with Wicksell’s ideas started with his Master’s thesis about the gold standard and monetary reform, which was supervised by Edward Amadeo. Wicksell’s model of the ‘Ideal Bank’ took a prominent place in the thesis. In 1990 Mauro went to Cambridge University for doctoral studies on a grant by CAPES, a governmental programme “for the improvement of higher education personnel” that he benefitted from throughout his career. The title of his Ph.D. thesis was Wicksell and the Business Cycle, and his advisor was Geoff Harcourt (A condensed preprint of the thesis was published in EJHET 2:2, 1995). After earning the doctoral degree in 1996 Mauro returned to the Universidade de Brasília where he came to serve as professor for the rest of his life.
Mauro was a prolific writer in the history of macroeconomics, in particular about the evolution of monetary theory, business cycle theory and development economics. He would not publish books, though, with few exceptions. The only monograph that he wrote, together with Roger Backhouse, was Transforming Modern Macroeconomics. Exploring Disequilibrium Microfoundations, 1956–2003 (Cambridge University Press, 2013). He also edited and co-edited a few volumes on business cycle theory, growth and development economics, and the history of Brazilian economic thought. Yet, Mauro’s strongly preferred format was the journal article. The publication record in his official CV of 2023 lists 80 articles in scientific journals; about five more were in production when he passed away. It should also be noted that Mauro was a champion of long articles. His pieces had about 25 pages on average, and some of them more than 50 pages, in an era in which journal editors tended to set strict limits at 15 pages or less. It may be seen as recognition of quality, or insight value added, that they let Mauro go so often to far greater length.
In most of his research Mauro took an “archivological” approach to the chosen topics. Starting from hunches based on broad reading of the available literature, he would go and dig in the archives to collect material that could serve as evidence on the formation and diffusion of the ideas and theories in question. Combining and recombining the findings from the archives and the more accessible literature like pieces in a jigsaw puzzle, he aimed at filling gaps and identifying overlooked linkages in the history of macroeconomics. This was detective work, and Mauro was open-minded enough, if not eager, to let the jigsaw puzzles take unexpected shapes in the process – with one exception. As we used to say jokingly, his favourite sport was to prove that Wicksell was always right, even in cases in which the master himself had had his doubts.
In various cases the inspiration for new projects would come from archival findings that Mauro had made accidentally while working on an earlier project. In other cases collected materials that were fully sufficient for producing a publishable paper would only spur him to continue the hunt if they contained hints that further documents existed without which he considered the picture to be incomplete. Two of Mauro’s favourite pieces, on which I happened to work with him, may illustrate such cases of “archivology”.
The first example is ‘An Early Manuscript by Knut Wicksell on the Bank Rate of Interest’ (HOPE 33:3, 2001), the article based on the manuscript that Mauro sent me after our first meeting. He had found it during his doctoral studies, when scouring Wicksell’s papers for writings on the business cycle. Wicksell kept his monetary theory, in which the bank rate played a key role, strictly apart from his sketchy attempts to construct a theory of the business cycle, which in his view was a non-monetary phenomenon. The manuscript that we now began to work on was an undated first draft for what came to be published as Geldzins und Güterpreise (1898, tr. Interest and Prices, 1936), Wicksell’s landmark contribution to monetary and macroeconomic theory. Our article provided evidence that the manuscript predated Interest and Prices by nine years and was written in a context different from what has been imputed in the literature. In the draft Wicksell developed an “Austrian” notion of the natural rate of interest, but not one that would make it a stabilising force as the equilibrium rate that coordinates investment with planned saving and sooner or later sets a limit to the cumulative process of inflation (or deflation). Our detective work on the draft and the surrounding evidence required the scrutiny of many documents in Swedish and German, and I was amazed by Mauro’s capacity to identify key passages in two languages that he did not speak and in Wicksell’s handwriting, a peculiar mix of Swedish cursive style and historical German Sütterlin not easy to read even for the trained eye of a native speaker.
A possible explanation for this phenomenal capacity comes from an observation made by Mario García Molina and shared with me in a message after Mauro’s passing. At the 2012 ESHET conference in Saint-Petersburg Mario and Mauro went together to the Hermitage Museum to see the Rembrandt paintings. As Mario wrote: “I spent a lot of time looking at every single painting. But Mauro took even longer than me! I guess not missing a detail and covering every aspect of a subject are marks of a scholar and he certainly had them.” Mauro’s extraordinary attention to detail is strongly evident in the second example, the article on ‘Haberler, the League of Nations, and the Quest for Consensus in Business Cycle Theory in the 1930s’ (HOPE 38:1, 2006). This project could also have run under the shorter title ‘The Making of Prosperity and Depression’, Gottfried Haberler’s famous book of 1937 which came to serve as a standard text in business cycle theory for half a century. Mauro suggested the project to me after having come across pertinent correspondence while working on an editorial project (Business Cycle Theory, Selected Texts (1860–1939), part 2 vols. V-VIII, Pickering & Chatto, 2005). This exchange was part of Haberler’s efforts to conduct a ‘Systematic Analysis’ of the great variety of business cycle theories that circulated at the time of the Great Depression. The survey formed the first part of Prosperity and Depression. A draft of the second part, titled ‘Synthetic Exposition of the Nature and Causes of the Business Cycles’, was thoroughly discussed by a committee of experts in seven meetings held in Geneva in Summer 1936. Among the experts were Dennis Robertson, Lionel Robbins, Bertil Ohlin, Charles Rist, Oskar Morgenstern and Jan Tinbergen – a rather diverse lot. However, by 2002 little was known about their influence on the consensus formation in the final version of Haberler’s synthesis. So, Mauro and I went to Geneva to search the archives of the League of Nations for evidence. We expected to the find the verbatim records of the meetings that Haberler mentioned in some letters, but we could not retrieve them, neither in Geneva nor in other likely places. Finally, we located them in the 22 metres of shelf space reserved for the Ohlin papers at the Swedish National Archives. The records and surrounding correspondence gave fascinating insights in the contents and style of live discussion in an international group of leading economists at the time. With this paper, as with many others, Mauro demonstrated that he was a master of rich contextualisation. My role in our internal division of labour was more that of a hunter of records and trimmer of drafts, which nevertheless resulted in an article that had the size of a short book.
Not only did Mauro look at the past in long studies of the history of macroeconomics. He also dared to confront modern economics with it, in shorter papers. He organised, for example, a session at the 2004 HES conference in Toronto on Michael Woodford’s Interest and Prices, which had come out just the year before. Contributors were David Laidler, Kevin Hoover, Perry Mehrling, myself and Woodford himself. Upon his arrival Woodford reported that his colleagues at Princeton and Columbia had quipped that, going by the invitation, his opus magnum had gone down in history after only one year. By contrast, the speakers at the session criticised Woodford sharply for ignoring crucial questions raised and insights gained in earlier macroeconomics, in particular by Wicksell whom Woodford revered as frontrunner to his work on the theoretical foundations of monetary policy. All the papers, including our ‘Wicksell after Woodford’ and Woodford’s response to the critics, were published in JHET 28:2 (2006). Woodford kept them freely accessible on his Columbia website for more than ten years. There they probably found more readers than in the journal.
While Wicksell remained the fixed star around which much of Mauro’s research revolved, he wrote copiously about other economists as well, and about the evolution of traditions and controversial concepts. To name his favourite subjects it may suffice to mention the names of Dennis Robertson, Ragnar Frisch, David Champernowne, Evsey Domar and Don Patinkin, or the concepts of involuntary unemployment and the natural rate of interest. Around the year 2005 Mauro moved closer to his geographical homeground and began to work on the Latin American history of development economics. He did this with a special focus on the contributions of Celso Furtado, but also in wider perspectives, such as the structuralist-monetarist debates, or the early views of outside observers like Alexander von Humboldt (EJHET 20:1, 2013) and Friedrich List (HOPE 45:4, 2013). Over the years, Mauro did not only cumulate a large number of articles, but also a sizable range of co-authors from many different backgrounds.
Coming from Brasília, Mauro needed to travel far and frequently for digging in the archives, for attending conferences, and for meeting with his co-authors and other colleagues that invited him to spend time at their institutions. Quite aptly he chose ‘Economists and their travels’ (JHET 40:2, 2018) as the topic for the presidential address that he delivered to the History of Economics Society at the end of his term in 2017. As he remembered in one of his last articles (forthcoming in JHET 46:4, December 2024), he had attended HES conferences since 1994 and served in various functions in that society. He was also a regular customer at ESHET conferences and a council member from 2006 until 2010. Himself providing an encouraging example of a successful career in the international scientific community, he supported the formation of ALAHPE, the Latin American network of historians of economic thought, and the activities of its younger scholars.
On 21 February 2024 Mauro Boianovsky passed away in Brasília at the age of 64, after some months of illness. Within few hours the internet was full of reactions to the death notice, mourning the great, and in many cases unexpected, loss for the community of historians of economic thought. If he had lived to see the signs of appreciation from all over the world, Mauro would have found them “surprising” (as he would say) with regard to the fact that he had been based in Brasília for most of his life – quite distant from the community’s main places of education, research and interaction even now, but much farther away in terms of travel and communication costs at the beginning of his career. By his personality and by his work, Mauro has contributed to shrinking the intercultural distances between doing research in the history of economics in different settings and parts of the world.
Carl von Ossietzky Universität Oldenburg, Oldenburg, Germany
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