ABSTRACT
INTRODUCTION Specialization is an inescapable concomitant of modern scholarship. Yet as Jacob Viner once wisely observed: ‘Men are not narrow in their intellectual interests by nature; it takes special and rigorous training to accomplish that end’;1 and equally strenuous efforts may occasionally be required if we are to break out from the constraints of our accustomed mental perspective. The following account may, of course, merely demonstrate the limitations of such exercises, since it is designed to present some familiar features of the development of economics in Britain (especially in England) and the USA against the background of the general intellectual culture in each country, of which the economist’s professional subculture forms a part. The purpose is not, I must insist, to advocate any form of cultural determinism, and I shall resist the temptation to employ an anthropological apparatus of the kind utilized in Axel Leijonhufvud’s brilliant spoof article, ‘Life among the Econ’,2 which focuses on the present state of mature (or perhaps decadent) professionalism. Instead, I propose to consider the evolution in economics of what Burton Bledstein has termed ‘the culture of professionalism’,3 that is, the ‘set of learned values and habitual responses’ which includes both ‘the set of internal values and pressures of the discipline’, to cite George Stigler’s well-known remark,4 and the exogenous influences at work upon the academic community.
