Inscribed by the author ‘For Dick, with kind regards, Alex October 1962’ in blue ink to the front free endpaper, and with the publisher’s compliments slip loosely inserted.
A collection of essays by the distinguish Russian-born American historian of economic thought Alexander Gerschenkron, including his most famous work, the titular essay ‘Economic Backwardness in Historical Perspective’.
‘Gerschenkron’s analysis is consciously anti-Marxian: it rejected the English Industrial Revolution as the normal pattern of economic development, and deprived the original accumulation of capital of much of its conceptual force. Elements of modernity and backwardness could survive side by side, and did in a systematic way. Apparent disadvantageous initial conditions of access to capital could be overcome. Success was rewarded with proportionately more rapid growth, signalled by a decisive spurt in industrial expansion’ (New Palgrave).
Gerschenkron was a stalwart of Harvard University where he ‘influenced a generation of Harvard economists through his required graduate course in economic history’ (New Palgrave). He was renowned as an enormously diverse scholar and polyglot, and was later described by the American economist Deirdre McCloskey, whose doctorate at Harvard was supervised by Gerschenkron, in the following terms: ‘Alexander Gerschenkron was not the best teacher or the best economist or the best historian among these—nor even, I think, the best human being. But he was the best scholar I have known.’
