Negotiating the “Middle-of-the-Road” Position: Paul Samuelson, Mit, and the Politics of Textbook Writing, 1945-55
- 1 December 2014
- journal article
- Published by Duke University Press in History of Political Economy
- Vol. 46 (suppl_1), 134-152
- https://doi.org/10.1215/00182702-2716145
Abstract
Previous contributions to the history of economics have tried to assess Paul Samuelson’s political positioning by tracing it in the subsequent editions of his famous textbook Economics. By contrast, this article depicts the making of Economics itself as a political process. It argues that the “middle-of-the-road” position that Samuelson adopted in the book was consciously constructed by the MIT economist, with the help of his home institution and his publishing company McGraw-Hill, in response to conservative criticisms of the textbook and pressures from members of the Corporation—MIT’s Board of Trustees. Though Samuelson first intended to write a policy-oriented textbook with a strong Keynesian inclination, the changes he introduced, while keeping most of the substance, made it a more theoretically inclined text, in which policy recommendations were presented in a softened fashion. These events, far from being anecdotal, should rather be seen as foundational in the identity of what historians are trying to identify as “MIT economics.”Keywords
This publication has 11 references indexed in Scilit:
- The Lucky Consistency of Milton Friedman’s Science and Politics, 1933–1963Published by Cambridge University Press (CUP) ,2011
- THE CHANGING PLACE OF VISUAL REPRESENTATION IN ECONOMICS: PAUL SAMUELSON BETWEEN PRINCIPLE AND STRATEGY, 1941–1955Journal of the History of Economic Thought, 2010
- Samuelson's "Economics" at Fifty: Remarks on the Occasion of the Anniversary of PublicationThe Journal of Economic Education, 1999
- Credo of a Lucky Textbook AuthorJournal of Economic Perspectives, 1997
- The Perseverance of Paul Samuelson's EconomicsJournal of Economic Perspectives, 1997
- After the Revolution: Paul Samuelson and the Textbook Keynesian ModelHistory of Political Economy, 1995
- The Eleven Principles of EconomicsSouthern Economic Journal, 1992
- Free Enterprise and Free Inquiry: The Emergence of Laissez-Faire Communitarianism in the Ideology of Science in the United StatesNew Literary History, 1990
- Endless Frontiers: The Story of Mcgraw-Hill. By Roger Burlingame. New York, McGraw-Hill Book Company, Inc., 1959. Pp. 506. $7.50.Business History Review, 1959
- Readings in EconomicsSouthern Economic Journal, 1951