page_title: Kenneth E. Boulding
section_title: Early years
hierarchical_section_title: Kenneth E. Boulding / Biography / Early years
caption_attribution_description: English: View of Seymour Street from London Road, Liverpool
context_page_description: Kenneth Ewart Boulding was an English-born American economist, educator, peace activist, and interdisciplinary philosopher. He published over 36 books and over 112 articles. Boulding was the author of two citation classics: The Image: Knowledge in Life and Society and Conflict and Defense: A General Theory. He was co-founder of general systems theory and founder of numerous ongoing intellectual projects in economics and social science. He was married to sociologist Elise M. Boulding.
context_section_description: Boulding was born and raised in Liverpool, England, the only child of William C. Boulding and Elizabeth Ann Boulding. His father was a gas fitter and a lay preacher in the Wesleyan Methodist Church, and his mother was a housewife. Boulding's middle name Ewart came from William Ewart Gladstone, of whom his father was a great admirer. In his adolescent years Boulding became interested in pacifism and joined the Religious Society of Friends.
  After attending Liverpool Collegiate School on a scholarship, Boulding won a chemistry scholarship to Oxford University at New College in 1929. He soon transferred to Philosophy, Politics and Economics. His economics tutors were Henry Phelps Brown, and Maurice Allen (1908–1988), who would become a director of the Bank of England in the late-1960s. Boulding obtained a First in economics in 1931. In his last year he wrote "The Place of the 'Displacement Cost' Concept in Economic Theory", which was accepted and published in The Economic Journal, after extensive comments by its editor John Maynard Keynes.
  On a small university scholarship Boulding spent another year at Oxford doing graduate work, which resulted in a thesis on capital movements. While he was turned down for a fellowship for Christ Church, Oxford, in 1932 he did win a Commonwealth Fellowship to the University of Chicago. En route he got "quite well acquainted" with Joseph Schumpeter.
  On the fellowship from 1932 to 1934, Boulding continued his economics studies at Chicago and at Harvard University. He rejected a proposal by Jacob Viner to just take up his PhD studies; instead, he took classes from Henry Schultz and Frank Knight, and wrote some of his own articles. At Chicago, he became friends with another graduate student, Albert Gailord Hart.
  Boulding studied with Schumpeter, until Boulding fell ill with a spontaneous pneumothorax. After recovery he spent the last six months of his Commonwealth Fellowship in Chicago, writing articles on capital theory. Two of those articles, "The Application of the Pure Theory of Population Change to the Theory of Capital", and "The Theory of a Single Investment", were published in The Quarterly Journal of Economics in 1934–1935, and were the topic of Frank H. Knight's reflection the next year. Boulding went back to the UK for three years. He later returned to the US for good, where he was granted citizenship in 1948.
caption: Seymour Street, Liverpool
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