For Viviana Di Giovinazzo, spending an afternoon in the handsome childhood home of Tibor Scitovsky, the famous Hungarian-born economist and the subject of her research, was special indeed. After all, the home, which is in Budapest, is not exactly open for visitors. For years it has been the residence of the English ambassador to Hungary, and it was only through a stroke of good timing—and her credentials as a Scitovsky scholar--that Viviana got to visit it at all.
“I was going to be in Budapest for only a week. Before my visit, I contacted the English embassy to see if I could see the house, explaining to them that I was writing a biography of Scitovsky and was in Budapest to collect materials for my research. The ambassador, I was told, had been out of the country for a month, but he was returning to Budapest on the very day I was to arrive.” Viviana promptly made an appointment for the next day.
“In fine English fashion, we had tea on the back porch and walked through the rose garden—the very rose garden that Scitovsky writes so warmly about in his memoirs.”
Viviana had seen photographs of the house in Scitovsky’s papers, which are in the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Duke University, but she didn’t know the very furniture she had seen in the photographs was still in the house—even in the very same rooms. As she discovered on her visit, the first ambassador to live in the house was a friend of Scitovsky’s, and he made sure that the house looked just as it did when the economist lived there. “Being in that house, seeing the same tables and chairs and dressers that I have seen in the photographs—it was all very moving. It was like being with Scitovsky himself.”
Viviana, a lecturer at the University of Milan Bicocca and a 2011-12 fellow of the Center for the History of Political Economy, is writing a biography of Scitovsky, best known for his 1976 book The Joyless Economy, which argues that Americans have created a dazzling economy but lack the education and values to fully enjoy it. At the center of her research are Scitovsky’s memoirs, which are also in the Rubenstein Library. The memoirs, Viviana says, contain a rich yet disorganized trove of observations and accounts. Her present challenge is to put the pieces together in such a way that makes sense to a biographer.
She hopes to write a life that clarifies or settles certain disputes surrounding Scitovsky. Leftists, for example, claim he was elitist, while rightists say he was paternalistic. And although many consider his work to be political, Viviana believes that many of Scitovsky's writings are primarily philosophical.
It is important, she says, to understand that Scitovsky was an inductive thinker. “He drew from his personal experiences—yes, from the conversations he overheard among the wealthy and privileged whom his parents entertained in their house, but also from the conversations he had with the chauffeur and the gardener who worked for his family. Throughout his life, he had feet in more than one camp, and that greatly influenced his work. His family had the house in the city, but they also had a house in the country, so he came to appreciate both urban and rural life. He went to Cambridge, but he also went to the LSE. The models he learned at the LSE were, he felt, beautiful, but his Cambridge training sensitized him to problems of unemployment and disequilibrium.”
When Viviana was in Budapest she interviewed another Hungarian economist, János Kornai, who was a close friend of Scitovsky’s, and she visited the library of the Central European University, which has several books from Scitovsky’s personal library. “It was especially poignant to see that his bookplate contained a picture of his childhood home.”
Viviana says that being at Duke and the Center gives her “the tranquility to write.” “My time here—it’s been indescribable. Scitovsky’s papers are here, and the library has all the books I need. And the interactions I’ve had with the other fellows have been invaluable. They have helped me to keep an objective picture of where I am and what I need to do next. At lunch, over coffee, two or three random words from my colleagues here can be illuminating.”
Viviana will return to Milan in December.