Thomas Haskell (1939-2017)

I'm a little behind the times on this, but I wanted to talk about Thomas Haskell's passing.  He spent most of his career as a professor at Rice University and was a fabulous scholar.  Haskell's debate with David Davis and John Ashworth on the emergence of humanitarian, anti-slavery sentiments amidst the growing market from the late 18th to the middle of the 19th century is one of the most important debates among intellectual historians of recent years.  I am very interested in the question why antislavery thought grew in conjunction with the market -- because we so often see the market as in conflict with ideas of humanity.  Haskell argued that the market led to sentiments of 

This is important for legal historians because there are other areas where the (sometimes) conflict of the market and humanitarian sentiments appear.  Legal historians will be interested in Morton Horwitz' write-up about this back in 1993. I wrote up a little bit about this at legal history blog a while back. I continue to believe that we should study how the growth of humanitarian sentiments appeared in law alongside the growth of a law that facilitated the market.  We can use the framework that Davis and Haskell debated to test what was happening in law.  For instance, I'd like to use their framework to look at the growth of trust law in the era of market revolution.  Sometimes those changes were driven by a desire to promote (or smooth the functioning of) the market; at other times, the changes were designed to limit the market.  For a long time I've thought that we should talk about how the market revolution, which brought so many positives in terms of economic growth while it also left some people behind, drove changes in law.  Doug Thie and I talk a little bit about this in the first part of our article on changes in probate in the Shenandoah Valley before the Civil War. But I want to focus a separate piece on this, on the effect of the market revolution on trust law in the pre-Civil War era down the road.

Comments

[Jeff Lipshaw]

Thank you, Al, for posting this. I was not aware. His first claim to fame as a very young historian was challenging, as a non-economist, the economic theory underlying the controversial Fogel & Engerman book, Time on the Cross, in the mid 1970s (when I was a serious undergraduate history major). F & E had argued that slave labor was more productive based on something called the "index of total factor productivity." He wrote a review in the New York Review of Books demonstrating that a Nobel Prize winning economist-to-be had gotten it wrong. He wrote, "By the time I had gotten halfway through it I suspected the authors had committed a blunder. Untrained in economics and having my Ph.D. in history only a year earlier, I knew it would seem absurdly presumptuous of me to accuse two of the nation's most distinguished economic historians of misusing a tool of their trade." His review began: "I am not an econometric historian or specialist in the history of slavery, but I am a reasonable man and, as such, entitled to judge the plausibility of the author's argument."

He has as much to say about scholarly method as the substance of scholarship. (I came upon him because he, like one of my mentors, was interested in the historiography, how history gets written. I return over and over again to his "Objectivity is Not Neutrality" for his thoughts on the difference between attributive cause and nomological-deductive cause - answering the question "why did you hit him?" as "he got me mad" rather than "my brain sent signals through various synapses to the muscles in my arm." Also his history of the development of the professional social science disciplines (an account of the American Social Science Association's rise and decline) is relevant today to anybody who thinks about interdisciplinarity.

[Enrique Guerra Pujol]

Jeff, your comment made me look up and read Haskell's review of "time on the cross". Here it is for the benefit of all faculty loungers who might be interested in this fascinating review: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/1974/09/19/were-slaves-more-efficient-some-doubts-about-time-/

[Enrique Guerra-Pujol]

I tried sending this before--here is a link to Haskell's review of Fogel & Engerman, TOTC: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/1974/09/19/were-slaves-more-efficient-some-doubts-about-time-/

[Enrique Guerra-Pujol]

Woe is me. I give up. I will stop trying to post Haskell's review of TOTC.