I really enjoyed reading Metaphysical Animals: How Four Women Brought Philosophy Back to Life by Clare Mac Cumhaill and Rachel Wiseman. It’s one of two recent books about the quartet Elizabeth Anscombe, Philippa Foot, Mary Midgley and Iris Murdoch, all philosophy students at Oxford just before and during World War Two, and remaining close in the postwar years as they began their scholarly and writing careers. (The other is The Women Are Up To Something by Benjamin Lipscomb, which I haven’t read yet.)

Unsurprisingly, the book is about philosophy rather than economics. I did PPE at Oxford and felt pretty hopeless at the philosophy despite doing ok in exams. We were taught the British tradition – Locke and Hume – and modern linguistic and analytic philosophy – Ayer and Hare. The four women didn’t feature; I’d heard of Irisl Murdoch only, and only for her novels. So I think this implies that the subtitle is perhaps wrong: at least from my perspective, the four might have halted the onward march of reductive positivism in philosophy, but they lost the war.

I was particularly struck by the description of how the shockingly male and misogynist Oxford philosophy establishment reclaimed territory when the men returned from war. “If undergraduate classes before the war had been full of ‘clever young men who liked winning arguments,’ … graduate classes were now led by such men and full of others who were being specifically trained in modern methods and hothoused for a profession that would reward cleverness, quickness and agression.”

Well, hello. Isn’t this the story of economics too? Both disciplines have painfully low proportions of women (and others from backgrounds where people are not automatically taught the confidence needed to put on a show of clever, quick and aggressive). Both are still like this. The culture and make-up are mutually reinforcing. There won’t be a quick solution if any, but the struggle of these four philosophers is inspiring. As is that of all the women of their era who fought to be able to wear trousers if they felt like it, and above all get the same education and scholarly opportunities as the men.

Christmas has passed in the usual blur of social over-eating, but I’ve found time to retreat and finish Hayek: A Life 1899-1950 by Bruce Caldwell and Hansjoerg Klausinger. As the authors state, they intended this to be the definitive biography and they have achieved this ambition. Not only do these 700+ pages (plus references etc) constitute only the first part of Hayek’s life, up to his move to the US, the account is based on deep research and familiarity with the mass of sources, primary and secondary, available.

Now ‘definitive’ also has its downsides, only one of which is mustering the strength to hold the book up to read it. Another is that parts of it just aren’t all that interesting: I was held by the story of Hayek’s late-Austro-Hungarian empire childhood but really not at all by his love life. This unfortunately includes his dreadful behaviour in divorcing his first wife after the second world war in favour of his childhood sweetheart, which – as it’s the final chapter of this volume – leaves one with a very negative impression of Hayek the human being. Still, it’s easy enough to skip these chapters.

However, the other downside – at least for one not deeply immersed in Hayek or Austrian School economics – is that it’s quite hard to follow the thread of the intellectual narrative. While ‘The Use of Knowledge in Society‘ is one of my all-time favourite economics articles, and I read ‘The Road to Serfdom‘ back in my undergraduate days, this isn’t my background. So while I did enjoy reading this biography –  particularly the section about Hayek’s intellectual formation in the early 20th century Vienna of logical positivism, and those about his presonal/intellectual rivalries particularly with Keynes during his years in England –  I’d be hard pushed to give a capsule description of what I’ve learned. So I will look forward to Volume 2, the Chicago years, but also to the eventual concise one-volume version of this definitive work.  

The unattractive word ‘herstory’ always makes me grit my teeth but of course I had to read A Herstory of Economics by Edith Kuiper. Nobody with any interest in economics can have failed to notice the welcome discussions of what a male-dominated profession it is, and how distorting that is. Not much has changed yet as a result (in terms of proportion of women, or selection of research questions, or indeed sometimes-toxic culture) but at least there is an awareness and a plan on the part of the professional associations.

One key thing I learned from Kuiper’s book is that there have been many more female economists than I ever realised. As well as some (now-)familiar names – Joan Robinson, Sadie Alexander, Rosa Luxemburg, Elinor Ostrom – the list at the front has many names I didn’t know, and also some I did know but had never considered to be economists. But the book makes a persuasive argument that this reflects the exclusion of women from universities until well into the 20th century, and writers on economics outside academia should therefore be included. The list is almost three pages long, for the period up to around the mid-20th century. Even then it has some omissions – Phyllis Deane for instance, or Edith Penrose. (Maybe the latter is a bit too late for this history, but then Ostrom is included.)

The book is ordered in broadly thematic rather than chronological chapters, after an introductory chapter about the origins of political economy, covering subjects like property rights, education, production, consumption and wealth/finance. The final two chapters cover government policies and then the role of feminist economics. While this organisation makes sense – a chronology would not have worked – it does mean there are some sharp corner turns as a chapter jumps from, say, an analysis of labour in the household to Ida Tarbell’s expose of Standard Oil, in the chapter on production.

Nevertheless, the book describes the important contributions of women to economics over more than a century, and in doing so illustrates the kinds of questions and social reality generally ignored by the male mainstream. It ends with a focus on the need for feminist economics to expand. I’ve never myself been interested in the separate arena of feminist economics because all of economics and economists should be feminist. The AER should be covering the kinds of questions that feature more often in Feminist Economics: the macroeconomics of gender and care (the topic of the current special issue)? Absolutely.

Still, that’s mostly about tactics. A Herstory of Economics gives a voice to some of the pioneers never included in the standard intellectual histories of the subject.