ABSTRACT
I lt is no accident that the tide given to this essayechoes that chosen by Donald Winch for his own contribution to the 1983 volume on which the present one is modeled. In writing on "Jacob Viner as Intellectual Historian," Winch was bringing to the fore one aspect of the mind and career of the man under whom he had written his own doctoral dissenation at Princeton in the late 1950s. That he chose to address his mentor's scholarly achievements "as intellectual historian" rather than as "historian of economic thought" says something about Viner, of course: according to Winch, there had come a time in Viner's career when he "moved away from doctrinal or single-discipline history of economics toward a more broadly defined kind of intellectual history" (Winch 1983b: 10). But the choice of label mayaiso say something about Winch hirnself, about the kind of intellectual perspective he looks for and prizes in the scholarship of others, and aspires to in his own. Intellectual history is what Donald Winch does, and, unlike his mentor, he has been at it his entire career.! How and why and over what range of subject matter are questions this essay will attempt to answer.
