Today, Paul Krugman stands out as a celebrated economist who engages prominently with the public through his regular column in the New York Times.
As the latest special issue of History of Political Economy suggests, Krugman is acting in a long line of important economists who at one time or another assumed the role of public intellectual.
The 2013 special issue, simply titled The Economist as Public Intellectual, looks at economists from the United States and Britain who were active during the twentieth century. Among the economists considered are Irving Fisher, John Maynard Keynes, and Lionel Robbins, as well as Milton Friedman, Gary Becker, and John Kenneth Galbraith.
In addition, two journalists, Walter Lippmann and Henry Hazlitt, who engaged extensively with economists and economic ideas are also subjects of papers.
As the editors of the volume, Tiago Mata and Steven G. Medema, explain in their introduction, the papers do not attempt to define what a public intellectual is but rather to examine what economists do, and what impact they have, when they intervene in the public sphere. "The unifying claim of our collection is that economists' public interventions have been of profound consequence for both the structure and the content of the public sphere."
The Economist as Public Intellectual may be ordered from the journal's page on the Duke University Press website.
For a complete list of the table of contents, click here.