To Be a Heterodox Economist: The Contested Landscape of American Economics, 1960s and 1970s

Abstract

What was it like to be a heterodox economist in the United States in the 1960s and 1970s? First, with the decline of McCarthyism and the rise of the civil rights and anti-war movements, it was now possible to become a heterodox economist and even find a teach-ing position without being immediately fired. But the possibility of existence brought with it a contested environment in which neoclassical economists attempted to keep the heterodox at bay. So in this contested environment, what was it like? Although there are various reminiscences scattered in books, journals, and biographical dictionaries of het-erodox economists and incomplete tales of individual daring and damning are passed around the community of heterodox economists, an overall view of what it was like remains elusive. This article is an attempt to partially answer the question. Thus, it starts with a brief description of the hegemony of neoclassical economics and the general atti-tude of neoclassical economists toward heterodox economics and economists. A more detailed inquiry follows into the bullying of, harassment of, and discrimination against inquisitive, open-minded graduate students and young heterodox professors by main-stream economists. The first part concludes that “life among the econ tribe ” for hetero-dox economists was often short (for ostracism was widely practiced) and difficult and brutish for the survivors. The second part of the article examines the efforts by heterodox economists to build heterodoxy, focusing on localized efforts to create supportive aca-demic and social environments. In particular, the efforts to make heterodox economics major, minor, or field components in Ph.D. programs are documented. By 1970 there were over 15,000 American economists, most of whom were neoclas-sical economists and belonged to the American Economic Association (AEA). Because of the repressive dominance of neoclassical economists and because of the pre- and

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 48 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.