Two works—one by the HOPE Center director and one by a former Visiting Scholar—have won top prizes from the History of Economics Society.
Bruce Caldwell’s new biography of Friedrich Hayek, written with Hansjoerg Klausinger of Vienna University, was awarded the 2023 Joseph J. Spengler Best Book Prize.
As stated in the HES’s official announcement, Hayek: A Life, 1899–1950 is “history of economics at its best. It is exemplary for the scholarly quality of our field, a book of rigor, precision, and detail, both regarding the contextual elements of Hayek’s private and professional life, and regarding the articulation of the author’s own interpretations.”
Bruce, who directs the HOPE Center, and Hansjoerg deftly maneuver through the tangled history of the world of Hayek’s first fifty years, drawing on previously unused family documents to uncover “new details on Hayek’s upbringing and his family relationships. The reader is drawn into, as if from Hayek’s own perspective, the development of a person acquiring a political vision and an academic mission, struggling to keep up university constraints and private life, both leaving an imprint on the development of his ideas.”
Hayek: A Life, 1899–1950 is published by the University of Chicago Press and is available for purchase on the publisher’s website.
The 2023 Craufurd Goodwin Best Article in the History of Economics Prize was awarded to Carlos Eduardo Suprinyak for his article titled “Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen, Development Economist,” published in 2022 in the Journal of the History of Economic Thought.
As the prize committee noted, Carlos Eduardo’s article “combines new insights in the history of various subfields of economics, in several institutional contexts to which Georgescu-Roegen contributed and in several cultures where he thrived.”
Whereas most accounts of Georgescu-Roegen focus on his contributions to mathematical economics or to what he called “bioeconomics,” Carlos Eduardo looks at Georgescu-Roegen’s involvement in development economics. Carlos Eduardo thus gives readers “a much clearer and more complete view of Georgescu-Roegen’s intellectual trajectory,” building a picture of its subject from numerous published and archival sources, including the correspondence between Georgescu-Roegen and many other economists and his travel reports as a participant in Vanderbilt University’s Graduate Program in Economic Development.
Carlos Eduardo’s article is based on archival work he did in Duke’s Economists Papers’ Archive when he was a Visiting Fellow here in the spring of 2018.
Congratulations to Bruce and to Carlos Eduardo for winning the two awards!
