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Secret Concatenations: Mandeville to Malthus
Based on Winch’s Carlyle lectures at Oxford University, Secret Concatenations is a history of modern political and economic thought by the leading intellectual historian of economics today. Taking us through a series of conversations that begin with Mandeville’s shocking thesis that private vice generates public good, Winch charts Adam Smith’s unlocking of the ‘secret concatenations’ linking the fortunes of rich and poor and traces the origins of the still ongoing ‘bitter argument between economists and human beings’. Against the background of the revolutionary events that shaped our modern world, Winch reveals the twists and turns of some of the most fundamental conversations in which we find ourselves participating today.
125 pages, Kindle Edition
Published April 29, 2015
8 people want to read
About the author
Donald Winch
23 books2 followersEmeritus Professor of Intellectual History and Chairman of the Advisory Board of the Centre for Intellectual History at the University of Sussex.
Born 1935 in London. A beneficiary of the 1944 Education Act, he attended a local grammar school and was awarded a state scholarship to study at the London School of Economics, where he obtained a degree in economics in 1956. His initial specialisation was in the economics of international trade, and a scholarship enabled him to study at Princeton, where Jacob Viner was the leading expert. Viner was also a notable historian of economics, and Winch chose to write a doctoral dissertation on the economics of empire and colonization, later published as Classical Political Economy and Colonies (1965).
Winch.s first academic appointment was at the University of California at Berkeley. He returned to this country when offered a lectureship in the department of political economy in Edinburgh. Three years later, in 1963, he was appointed to a lectureship at the University of Sussex, where he has remained for nearly half a century, broken by visiting appointments in Cambridge, Oxford, North America and Japan. For most of that time Winch was attached to the School of Social Sciences, becoming its Dean for 6 years in 1968. His main undergraduate teaching centred on one of the School.s compulsory contextual courses, Concepts, Methods, and Values (CMV). This enabled him to extend his interest in the methodology and history of economics into a broader concern with the history of the social sciences from the Enlightenment onwards. He continued to teach economics well into the 1980s, though by then most of his teaching, and all of his research, was in intellectual history.
Born 1935 in London. A beneficiary of the 1944 Education Act, he attended a local grammar school and was awarded a state scholarship to study at the London School of Economics, where he obtained a degree in economics in 1956. His initial specialisation was in the economics of international trade, and a scholarship enabled him to study at Princeton, where Jacob Viner was the leading expert. Viner was also a notable historian of economics, and Winch chose to write a doctoral dissertation on the economics of empire and colonization, later published as Classical Political Economy and Colonies (1965).
Winch.s first academic appointment was at the University of California at Berkeley. He returned to this country when offered a lectureship in the department of political economy in Edinburgh. Three years later, in 1963, he was appointed to a lectureship at the University of Sussex, where he has remained for nearly half a century, broken by visiting appointments in Cambridge, Oxford, North America and Japan. For most of that time Winch was attached to the School of Social Sciences, becoming its Dean for 6 years in 1968. His main undergraduate teaching centred on one of the School.s compulsory contextual courses, Concepts, Methods, and Values (CMV). This enabled him to extend his interest in the methodology and history of economics into a broader concern with the history of the social sciences from the Enlightenment onwards. He continued to teach economics well into the 1980s, though by then most of his teaching, and all of his research, was in intellectual history.
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January 19, 2017
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