A small but rich archive of correspondence between the Nobel prize winning economist Paul Samuelson and the New Zealand economist Mark Donoghue, including five long and generous Typed Letters Signed from Samuelson containing in-depth discussion of theoretical points in the history of economics.
The earliest letter from Samuelson, dated ‘22 January 1992’, relates to the Austrian-born economist Harro Bernardelli (1906-1981), with whom a young Paul Samuelson had engaged in a dispute published in the journal Economica in 1938-39 relating to the immeasurability of total and marginal utility. At the time of writing, Donoghue was working as a research assistant alongside Peter Groenewgen at the University of Sydney, and was collecting material in preparation for a biographical piece on Bernardelli. Reflecting on the disagreement, Samuelson writes: ‘I re-read my 1939 Economica piece on Bernardelli. It reads O.K. to me in 1992, and perhaps could have been made even stronger.’ Samuelson continues: ‘You do not mention what I had considered his most notable contribution: the matrix discrete-time version of the Lotka population-growth model. Subsequently Leslie got most credit for it but priority in time was definitely Bernardelli’s’.
The next two letters from Samuelson, sent together dated ‘12 August 1994’ and ‘15 August 1994’, pertain to the Nobel Prize winning British economist Sir John Richard Hicks, who was the subject of Donoghue’s doctoral thesis at the Australian National University on Hicks and the development of microeconomic theory, 1930-1950.
The ‘12 August’ letter stands at three dense pages and contains remarkable comments by Samuelson on his admiration for Hicks and his influence on Samuelson’s own thought: “No one’s work paralleled Hicks’s as closely as mine. I learned much from him - essentially all that was there to be learned. … Perhaps his Revision of Demand Theory overlapped most with my revealed preference stuff. It was not a terribly successful effort but it, so to speak, kept his hand in the ongoing poker game. So original was John R. Hicks that even in his less successful efforts he could not help coming up with original insights arrived at in his own individual way.” Samuelson also extends personal insights into Hicks as a man (“I thought his English contemporaries underestimated him – both for reasons of political ideology and psychological resentments. His oral talents were not up to his written talents; being a proud person, that bothered him more than it should have. He resented having to share the Nobel Prize…”) and there is a somewhat pointed discussion of Hicks’s tendency towards rather casual citations in his works (“At a number of places he did make reference to my somewhat relevant researches. But generally the wordings were vague … Early on I resolved to benefit from his writings and not be concerned as to whether or not he benefitted in similar degree from mine”).
The ‘15 August’ letter answers Donoghue’s earlier request to forward any relevant correspondence between Samuelson and Hicks, enclosing 13 pages of photocopied correspondence. These two letters from Samuelson are then followed-up by a letter dated ‘9 November 1994’ from Samuelson’s assistant Janice Murray enclosing enclosing 14 pages of photocopied correspondence between Hicks and Robert Solow.
The next round of correspondence is an exchange of offprints, with Samuelson writing in a letter dated ‘15 December 1998’ in response to Donoghue’s request for copies of Samuelson’s articles ‘The Classical Classical Fallacy’ and ‘The “Transformation” from Marxian “Value” to Competitive “Prices”: a Process of Rejection and Replacement’, both of which are enclosed with Samuelson’s letter. Samuelson takes time to particularly comment on ‘The Classical Classical Fallacy’ article: “I have a feeling that except for me no one, including the referees, really read and understood the scores of dogmatic assertions in this piece. I was generous in finding faults there; but each indictment was based on cogent proof and syllogisms”. Samuelson also remarks upon an article previously sent to him by Donoghue on William Thomas Thornton, member of J.S. Mill’s circle: “Finally, I thank you for the item on W.T. Thornton and the item concerning Cairnes on rehabilitation of the wage fund. When a sliver of leisure appears, I hope to get from them interest, utility and profit. Cairnes was an able scholar caught in a period of transition. (Yogi Berra, the great baseball player, said: ‘When you come to a fork in the road, take it.’)”. Donoghue’s work on Thornton would eventually become a full-length biography published in 2016 under the title Faithful Victorian: William Thomas Thornton, 1813-1880.
The final letter, dated ‘9 June 1999’, consists of Samuelson sending Donoghue the submitted draft of his forthcoming book chapter titled ‘Samuelson’s Contributions to the History of Classical Economics’. The long two page letter shows Samuelson in a contemplative mood, with reflective comments on the position of the history of economic thought within his own work, particularly commenting on his early experiences of teaching of the subject: “My formal course work at Chicago and Harvard, under Viner, Knight and Schumpeter, involved very little of doctrinal history. By now most top graduate schools require (and offer) virtually no history of doctrine.“ Samuelson also makes reference to his critiques of Marx (“My audit of him is a harsh one; I single out as useful only his circular-flow explorations à la Quesnay.”) as well as Piero Sraffa (“… my competent friends regard all this as a waste of time; my readers, mostly Sraffian cultists, reveal little in the way of dents on their thinking“).
The letter concludes with a long reflection on the development of Samuelson’s own methodology:
‘Looking back 65 years I perceive little basic change in my methodology. In economics, as in thermodynamics or dynamic Darwinism, I look for regularities in the facts and for theoretical models that best fit those facts. Except that Friedman’s brand of what he calls “positivism” gives that word a bad name, I might be labelled a logical positivist. After you strip away irrelevant metaphysical baggage, Petty, Cantillon, Hume, Turgot, Smith, Malthus, Ricardo, Thünen, Longfield, Mill, Jevons, Walras, Menger, Marshall, Edgeworth, Wicksell, Pareto, Fisher, Pigou, Keynes and Arrow seem, to me, to be methodologically similar. My eclectic value judgments remain little changed in this era of increasingly conservative economics; but my judgment concerning what is pragmatically “feasible” reduces my sentimentality.’
A rich and stimulating correspondence, the full contents of which are as follows:
SAMUELSON (Paul A.) Typed Letter Signed (‘Paul A Samuelson’) to Mark Donoghue (‘Dear Mark Donoghue’). Cambridge, Massachusetts, ‘22 January 1992’.
1 page 4to on Massachusetts Institute of Technology letterhead with associated stamped and franked airmail envelope.
SAMUELSON (Paul A.) Two Typed Letters Signed (‘Paul A Samuelson’) to Mark Donoghue (‘Dear Mark Donoghue’). Cambridge, Massachusetts, ‘12 August 1994’ & ‘15 August 1994’.
3 pages and 1 page 4to on Massachusetts Institute of Technology letterhead along with 13 pages of photocopied correspondence between Samuelson and John Richard Hicks, all housed together in associated stamped and franked airmail envelope.
MURRAY (Janice). Typed Letter Signed (‘Janice Murray’) to Mark Donoghue (‘Dear Professor Donoghue’). Cambridge, Massachusetts, ‘9 November 1994’.
1 page 8vo on Massachusetts Institute of Technology letterhead with associated franked and stamped airmail envelope with printed address label, enclosing 14 pages of photocopied correspondence between John Richard Hicks and Robert Solow.
SAMUELSON (Paul A.) Out of the Closet: A Program for the Whig History of Economic Science.
A photocopy of Samuelson’s Keynote Address at History of Economics Society Boston Meeting, June 20, 1987, with a printed ‘With the Compliments of Paul A. Samuelson’ loosely inserted, along with an earlier offprint of Samuelson’s article ‘Economic Theory and Mathematics - An Appraisal’ from the American Economic Review, Volume XLII, No. 2, May, 1952, housed together in associated franked and stamped airmail envelope with printed address label, postmark dated ‘17 Nov 1994’.
SAMUELSON (Paul A.) Typed Letter Signed (‘Paul [Samuelson]’) to Mark Donoghue (‘Dear Professor Donoghue’). Cambridge, Massachusetts, ‘15 December 1998’.
1 page 4to on Massachusetts Institute of Technology letterhead with associated franked and stamped airmail envelope with printed address label, enclosing an original offprint of Samuelson’s article ‘The Classical Classical Fallacy’ (Journal of Economic Literature, Vol. XXXII, June 1994, pp. 620-639) along with a photocopy of Samuelson’s 1970 article ‘The “Transformation” from Marxian “Value” to Competitive “Prices”: a Process of Rejection and Replacement’ reproduced from Vol. 3 of his Collected Works.
SAMUELSON (Paul A.) Typed Letter Signed (‘Paul’) to Mark Donoghue (‘Dear Mark’). Cambridge, Massachusetts, ‘9 June 1999’.
2 pages 4to on Massachusetts Institute of Technology letterhead with associated franked and stamped airmail envelope with printed address label, enclosing a copy of Samuelson’s submitted draft of a book chapter by Samuelson titled ‘Samuelson’s Contributions to the History of Classical Economics’ to be published in the then-forthcoming Elgar Encyclopedia of Classical Economics, edited by Heinz Kurz and Neri Salvadori.
SAMUELSON (Paul A.) A Modern Post-Mortem on Böhm’s Capital Theory: Its Vital Normative Flaw Shared by pre-Sraffian Mainstream Capital Theory.
Original offprint. 8vo. [301]-317, [1, blank] pp. Original self-wrappers, wire-stitched as issued. Journal of the History of Economic Thought, Volume 23, Number 3, 2001., with a printed ‘With the Compliments of Paul A. Samuelson’ slip loosely inserted, housed in associated franked and stamped airmail envelope with printed address label.
All in near fine to fine condition.
