Larry Moss and the Struggle against Racism by the Whately Professors of Political Economy

I Introduction SOME OF OUR memories of Laurence Moss are independent. But much of Larry's influence relates to our joint work and so it is appropriate on this occasion to remember him together. In this note, we highlight an important consideration of his life's work, the continual struggle within economics against racism. Larry initiated and supported the symposium on eugenics published by the American Journal of Economics and Sociology in July 2005. He edited the volume Social Inequality, Analytical Egalitarianism and the March Toward Eugenic Explanations in the Social Sciences" in August 2008. These constitute obvious signs of Larry's concern. Talk about how eugenics has influenced economics in the past makes for difficult reading. We have been told, in the august setting of a journal's referee report, that our work on eugenics should not be published because (a) the topic is difficult and (b) we don't know enough about how bad it really was. When we proposed a session at the ASSA on eugenics, we were encouraged not to use the word "eugenics" in the session title. It was indeed concern for decorum that, as Larry told us, prompted him to remove the barbed wire imagery from the cover picture of Social Inequality. The concentration camp image remains, but he did not insist that the reader see it. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Why was Larry so determined that economists know about the struggle within economics over race and racism? It should be noted that we use "racism" loosely here, as "race" was only vaguely defined throughout the period we study, the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Race was used then to describe categories that changed over time. It sometimes denoted religious differences--the Jews or the Catholics-and sometimes captured what today we might call differences in culture. In all of the historical episodes we have studied, racial difference is used to suggest hierarchy--those in a favored race were supposedly superior decisionmakers and those in purportedly inferior category (such as the Irish) were ill-equipped to make economic and political decisions. (1) Like us, Larry was convinced that if we remove the struggle against racism from the discipline's memory, we diminish the contributions of those who bore the brunt of the fight. His longstanding interest in the work of Ludwig von Mises (Moss 1976a) and what he came to call the Trinity College Dublin School (Moss 1976b, 2010) places his research on the cutting edge of the early fight against racism. Of von Mises we have little more to say except that Larry correctly reminded us, after reading an early version of our book The Vanity of the Philosopher (Peart and Levy 2005), that we had done less than justice to von Mises. We were grateful to be able to correct that failing before the book was printed. The last time we saw Larry was at the York University History of Economic Society meeting in June 2008. There, he attended a panel we organized on Richard Whately. We spoke about Whately at the session (Levy and Peart 2010) and afterward, and Larry continued that conversation after the conference. In this paper, we explore why Larry's project on the Whately professorships needs to be completed. II The Whately Professors of Political Economy WHEN JACOB VINER reviewed Joseph Schumpeter's 1954 History of Economic Analysis, he noted that there were only a few gaps in coverage. He mentioned one neglected group, the Whatley professors of political economy (Viner [1954] 1958: 348). The first systematic attempt to fill that gap came from Viner's student R. D. Collison Black (1945, 1953, 1960). Larry's dissertation was the first ful-length study of the first and most influential of the group, Mountiford Longfield (Moss 1976b). He returned to the subject in his important paper "Value and Distribution Theory at Trinity College Dublin 1831-1844" (Moss 2010). Here, we consider two neglected Whately professors of political economy who confronted anti-Irish racism directly. …