GERSCHENKRON (Alexander).
Europe in the Russian Mirror: Four Lectures in Economic History.
A collection of essays by the distinguished Russian-born historian of economic thought Alexander Gerschenkron on ‘the contribution which study of Russian economic history can make to the problems which have preoccupied Western historians’ (dust jacket blurb).
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.’
