W. W. Rostow - History, Policy, and Economic Theory: Essays in Interaction

Essays in Interaction

W. W. Rostow

First published 1990 by Westview Press

Published 2018 by Routledge
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Copyright 1990 by W. W. Rostow

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Rostow, W. W. (Walt Whitman), 1916
History, policy, and economic theory: essays in interaction /
W. W. Rostow.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographies.
ISBN 0-8133-0918-2
1. Economics. 2. Economic policy. 3. Economic history.
I. Title.
HB171.R673 1990
330dc20 89-5697
CIP

ISBN 13: 978-0-367-00363-0 (hbk)

ust before I began to write this prefatory note I ran across the following observation by Josef Skvorecky, the expatriate Czech novelist: "Some writers may think their only subject is themselves: if they are any good they are telling the history of their time and of their people in the form of a self-portrait. For the self-portrait has an open landscape in the background, with little human figures toiling and frolicking in it, as in a genre painting by a Dutch Master."

A collection of professional essays spanning a half-century is, inevitably, autobiographical after a fashion; but fellow economists and historians do, indeed, populate these essays. Moreover, one can trace fairly well the sequence of the great issues of public policy that marked these decades. There is also the reflection of a good deal of toil but, unfortunately, not much frolicking.

So far as intellectual autobiography is concerned, I was struck, in reviewing these pieces, by the continuity over the years of my approach to economic analysis. From the beginning, for example, I have been concerned more than most of my contemporaries with the generation and diffusion of technology; the generation of adequate supplies of food, raw materials, and energy; and, above all, by the inescapable role of noneconomic forces in economic analysis. There is no mystery about the source of my emphasis on the effects of noneconomic forces. After an initial focus on history, I turned in my sophomore year at Yale to a systematic effort to link the insights and methods of economics and history. For wholly understandable reasonsat a time of unexampled unemployment in the Western worldthe most exciting work in economic theory concerned effective demand and its manipulation by public policy. But I soon found that economic history simply could not be explained in terms of fluctuations in effective demand, under Marshallian shortperiod assumptions, with the supply side frozen or subject to once-over change. Nor could the unfolding of economic events be explained if one abstracted from the noneconomic forces at work. The same propositions have turned out to be valid in the analysis of current problems in the world economy.

From the beginning to end, then, my work as an economist has been an effort to fill these gaps in mainstream economic theory in a systematic way. The challenge incorporated in that effort may explain the ease and excitement with which I had turned back to academic life after three intervals in public service: 1941-1946; 1947-1949; 1961-1969. The task I had chosen was evidently much larger than any one person's capacities. I explored facets of it piece by piece; therefore, on each return to academic life I knew on which unsolved piece of the problem I had to resume. For example, the fragmentary reflections on the noneconomic dimensions of industrialization in my August 1960 Stockholm essay () clearly foreshadow the subject of my first post-Washington book, Politics and the Stages of Growth (1971).

How does one structure a collection of essays like this? Alter some experiment, my admirable editor at Westview Press, Spencer Carr, and I decided to group the essays under five areas that have concerned me for longer than a half-century:

This organizational method, we hope, will make it easy for the reader to perceive the strands of continuity as well as those of evolution that are reflected in these essays. I should also note that all the essays do not neatly fit our five categories. But that is not wholly inappropriate in a book whose overarching theme is interaction.

The debate with Paul Kennedy () speaks tor itselt. At first sight, its ultimate themean appropriate military and foreign policy for the United States in the generation now aheaddoes not appear to fit the subject matter of this book. But as the prefatory note for that chapter underlines, the ultimate analytic issues center on technology and the stages of economic growth in relation to the contours of global power and politics.

A word about the dedication: Professor M. M. Postan of Cambridge was a close friend from 1938 until his death in 1981. I first met him when he was editor of The Economic History Review. I had submitted an article for publication at the suggestion of Humphrey Sumner, then at Balliol College, Oxford. Postan not only accepted the piece but also invited me to join him in Wiltshire for a weekend. The animated dialogue that began that weekend continued without significant interruption even during years of war and when I was in the public service in Geneva and Washington. Postan appears at several points in this book.

There have been few academics who did more to nurture their field than did Postan over the long span of his professional life: by his scholarly example and teaching, through The Economic History Review and International Economic History Association, and by his editorship of The Cambridge Economic History of Europe. His reign had two special characteristics: an extraordinarily infectious enthusiasm and his capacity to inspire young scholars while quite consciously making sure they pursued their own bent. He sought colleagues not disciples. For several generations there was hardly a major economic historian, in any country, whose career had not been touched by Postan and who did not treasure that tie.

In assembling these essays and writing prefatory notes I was greatly helped by my assistant, Lois Nivens, and by Mickey Russell who imperturbably got the typing done while moving an office.