Michael V. White: A Scholar’s Scholar and 2018 HETSA Fellow^*

* H. Maas, J. Lodewijks, and A. Endres commented on a draft of this appraisal, but, as is customary, are absolved from any errors contained herein. White was deliberately kept at arm’s length during its writing but was given the opportunity to correct obvious errors in the penultimate draft, which he did with some grace. He did not fully accept every interpretation advanced in the appraisal and, as with all academics of worth, now disagrees with one or two of his own published contentions.

Abstract

Michael V. White was appointed Distinguished Fellow of the HETSA society in 2018. To mark this occasion eight of White's significant contributions to the history of economic thought are appraised. These contributions are also placed in context by considering the productive exchanges White undertook with his peers in the public domain.

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Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 The details of White’s work history are derived from a CV that is dated 2018, while White’s joint-election manifesto along New Left lines may be found in a 17 July 1972 issue of Lot’s Wife. White stated to the author in email correspondence on 9 December 2019 that he was a ‘spear carrier’ rather than a central figure in the Monash student movement, which is partly reflected by his election to a student committee rather than the central executive.

2 Harcourt conveyed that La Nauze appreciated White in a conversation with the author on 4 October 2019 and related the Whitaker anecdote in email correspondence on 10 January 2019. Groenewegen repeatedly commented in White’s favour to the author over many decades. For La Nauze’s nickname of ‘Jack the Knife’, see Macintyre (2012).

3 Hutchison’s larger grievance is captured by the anachronistic and hostile references to Marx (11 times), Engels (5 times), Lenin (2 times) and Mao (2 times) within his 1982 article. He even slipped in a reference to the corrupted Cambridge tradition, stating that Jevons’s distaste for politicians would have prevented him embracing Cambridge welfare economics of ‘an omniscient and benevolent government’ that is ‘directed either, on the one hand, by the products, sent out “with cool heads but warm hearts”, of Marshall’s Economics Tripos, or, alternatively, as embodied in such highly praised figures, in their own day, as Stalin and Mao’ (Hutchinson 1982, 367). Hutchison is always worth reading. His other criticisms of White, such as the contention that Lardner influenced Jevons’s vision, were afterthoughts compared to defending Jevons as a non-doctrinaire, and hence may be put to one side. Also note that Black (1970, 18–19, 1981, 7) had earlier objected to the contentions that Jevons was initially motivated by a quest to develop a distribution theory and was a doctrinaire, but did not enter the public exchange (see also Schabas 2000).

4 Levy and Peart (2005, 77n) do refer to White (1994b), while Peart (1996, 289) refers to White (1994c). Also note that both Hutchison (1994a, 69–70) and White (1994c, 81) warn against non-contextual interpretations of references to ‘race’ and ‘ethnography’ in which passages are bent to support a hypothesis. Finally, the ideological overtone of the Hutchison–White exchange is again caught in Hutchison’s reference to contemporary concerns, such as the then recent demise of the USSR. He contended that Marx and Engels were more racist than Jevons and went astray with regard to the labour theory of value, which was proved in the collapse of ‘Marxian economic planning’ – while the ‘capitalist economies, roughly and imperfectly guided by the kind of value and price theory pioneered by Jevons, still manage to struggle forward’ (White 1994a, 70).

5 It should be noted that whig history and rational reconstructions are quite different, with the latter approach sound enough when used knowingly and with the realization that it is not history in the strictest sense. Thus, there is nothing necessarily wrong with rationally reconstructing the Jevonsian demand curve as Marshallian (or, say, Adam Smith’s conceptual system as neo-Ricardian), especially for teaching purposes, if one does not use the anachronistic readings of the relevant narratives to confidently claim that this was the inevitable trajectory of Jevons’s heuristic. Too much can also be made of the whig trap on occasion, since it is entirely possible for one theory to beget a superior theory. Again, it is a matter of making the ‘begetting’ claim, with suitable evidence, while knowing that a common trap exists. Thus, Ekelund and Shieh may very well be right. In defence of White’s approach, the contextualist historian is (a) less likely to present faulty historical narratives by unknowingly deploying prefabricated visions and (b) more likely to present any given historical juncture as one with many possible futures. White himself tends to represent the 1860s and 1870s as a period in which the meaning of the laws of supply and demand was ‘still up for grabs’ and occupies himself with the goal of explaining why one meaning was eventually stabilized as dominant.

6 White does not, of course, deny that Jevons was hostile to elements of Mill’s political economy. It is also worth noting that White’s archival-based narratives devoted to institutionalized discrimination, which includes detailed analysis of the marginalization of H. D. Macleod and others, really deserve a separate section, but a line must be drawn if this narrative is not to balloon.

7 Peart (1996. 36) also questioned White’s (and Philip Mirowski’s) contention that TCQ provides evidence that Jevons’s economic vision was shaped by energy physics (discussed in section eight).

8 The historically minded Viner was active in this codification. He alerted Schultz (1938, 51–2) and Stigler (1947, 154) to Powell’s entry. Indeed, strictly speaking Schultz (1938, 51–2) was the first to associate Gray with the Giffen good, even though Shultz nowhere mentions Giffen in his analysis. See also the exchange between Prest (1948) and Stigler (1948).

9 White does not consider another possible historiographical slip of confusing a precursor with a pioneer of the engine of discovery that enabled the discovery. This issue, however, is usually handled better in the Giffen-good literature. Stigler (1950, 327) suggested that Marshall’s Giffen analysis may have been partly induced by Irving Fisher’s 1892 work on competing and completing goods (i.e. the important shift away from additive utility functions that Marshall usually employed). Similarly, Dooley (1985, 203–4) suggested that Marshall’s Giffen analysis may have been inspired by both Vilfredo Pareto’s 1893 mathematical rendering of the generalized utility function (an engine) and his famous boat-rail example (a theory).

10 McCloskey famously promoted her ‘rhetoric of economics’ research program in Australia in a series of seminars, including in Adelaide, in the early 1980s, but given the early date of White’s RCE piece, this could not be the primary prompt for White’s early rhetorical turn (even if he could not help but draw upon McCloskey’s path-breaking work later). The origins of White’s rhetorical turn are sufficiently mysterious that I asked him for an explanation. He identified the following prompts as particularly important: the employment of the RCE model with edifying precision in Monash microeconomic classes, Stephen Hymer’s article of 1971 on Robinson Crusoe (which he read while still an undergraduate), Tony Bennett’s Formalism and Marxism of 1979 and Humphrey McQueen’s Black Swan of Trespass of 1982. White added that Noel King both suggested publishing the RCE piece in the Southern Review and edited it extensively (email: 2 December 2019).

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Gregory C. G. Moore

Gregory C. G. Moore is a professor of economics at the University of Notre Dame Australia. He specializes in teaching undergraduates and publishes occasionally in the sub-discipline of the history of economic thought.