Henry William Spiegel

Henry William Spiegel (1911-1995) was an American economist and historian of economic thought

Spiegel was born in Berlin, Germany, on October 13, 1911. Despite the financial setbacks connected to the early death of his parents, in 1930 he graduated from the Friedrich-Wilhelm-Gymnasium, where he received a classical humanities education. After this, he studied law at the Universities of Heidelberg and Cologne, and attended the University of Berlin, where he received the degree of Doctor of Law in 1933. The anti-Jewish Nazi administration denied Spiegel his appointment as a lawyer, although he did pass the first state examination. For some time he made a living as a journalist, publishing, for example, two long newspaper stories on war economics and the debate about nationalization of the munitions industry [Neue Zuercher Zeitung (July 8, 1936, and August 21-22, 1936)] . That same year he emigrated to the United States. Spiegel was a member of the cohort of emigre scholars who got their first academic training at German or Austrian universities but were still young enough and flexible enough to start all over again and obtain a second one in their new countries, typically the United States or the United Kingdom.
Development economics emerged as a new economics subdiscipline at the end of World War II. This field was a virtual magnet for doctoral research during the 1950s. Spiegel, along with other well-known economists, including "enemy aliens" like Albert O. Hirschman and Paul Baran, had served in the U.S. Office of Strategic Services from 1942 to 1945. Spiegel's attitude following his early research on Brazil with a Guggenheim Fellowship to study the Brazilian economy, clearly can be seen in this context. Spiegel's approach to the Brazilian economy (1949) emphasizes the political economy of development rather than the narrow technical conditions for "steady-state" growth which to some extent has come to replace the older institutional approach.

Another field to which Spiegel made important contributions was the history of economic thought, partly in the form of journal articles, but especially in his magisterial "The Growth of Economic Thought" (1971). His "The Rise of American Economic Thought" (1960) introduced, brought together and interpreted the work of some two dozen early U.S. economists and several important episodes prior to 1886. His "The Development of Economic Thought: Great Economists in Perspective" (1952) brought together previously published and newly commissioned materials on economists summarizing and, especially, interpreting the work of other economists, from Aristotle on Plato, to Paul A. Samuelson on John Maynard Keynes, to Colin Clark on Arthur Cecil Pigou.

Spiegel's most celebrated contribution to the history of economic thought, "The Growth of Economic Thought" (1971), is seen as a masterpiece by many historians of economic thought. It is interesting to note that the history of economic thought in the immediate post-World War II period was dominated by refugee scholars. Eduard Heimann's "History of Economic Doctrines" (1945), Joseph A. Schumpeter's "History of Economic Analysis" (1954), Mark Blaug's "Economic Theory in Retrospect" (1962), or Karl Pribram's "History of Economic Reasoning" (1983) all attest to this rule. A good author in this field, on top of being a good economist, clearly has to be cosmopolitan. Indeed, in his host country Spiegel noted that a central American characteristic is to have a far more forward-looking perspective and a worse memory than people have in most other countries.

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Major publications

*"The Brazilian Economy, 1949.
*"The Development of Economic Thought: Great Economists in Perspective" (editor), 1952.
*"The Rise of American Economic Thought", 1960.
*"The Growth of Economic Thought", 1971.
*"Contemporary Economists in Perspective" (2 vols.), 1984.
*"Economics," in J. Ischel and S. Pinsker (eds.), "Jewish-American History and Culture: An Encyclopedia", 1992.
*"Refugee Economists and the Mathematization of Economics," in Hagemann, H. (ed.), "Zur deutschsprachigen wirtschaftswissenschaftlichen Emigration nach 1933", 1997), pp. 343-52.

econdary sources

* Moss, Laurence S. (e.a.). "Dr. Henry William Spiegel (1911-1995): emigre economist, historian of economics, creative scholar, and companion.(Remembrance and Appreciation Roundtable)", "American Journal of Economics and Sociology", 1998.

* Blaug, M. (1962), "Economic Theory in Retrospect"
* Heimann, Eduard (1945). "History of Economic Doctrines"
* Pribram, Karl (1983), "History of Economic Reasoning"
* Schumpeter, Joseph A. (1954), "History of Economic Analysis"