THE HISTORY OF ECONOMIC THOUGHT FROM THE VIEWPOINT OF HES PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESSES

Abstract

The History of Economics Society (HES) has traveled a long way throughout its fifty conferences, from the first one organized by Warren Samuels and Vincent Tarascio on May 30 and 31, 1973, in Chicago, to the fiftieth annual meetings that took place on June 23 to 25, 2023, in Vancouver, Canada. This journey can be analyzed in different ways, and here we focus on the presidential addresses delivered as a guide to our analysis. From the conference programs we identified a total of forty-four presidential addresses: the first to appear on the conference program was Vincent Tarascio’s speech on Vilfredo Pareto, on the second day of the Boston conference in 1975. Since 1975, presidential addresses have become a regular feature of the conference, with rare exceptions such as the 1977 Irvine, CA, conference or in the recent years when Marcel Boumans’s presidential address was postponed from 2020 to 2022 due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Of the forty-four presidential addresses in the history of HES, we analyzed the forty-one that were published in scholarly journals (see Table 1). However, we could not find whether two presidential addresses—specifically Joseph Spengler, HES conference 1976, Chicago; and Carl Uhr, HES conference 1978, Toronto—have been published. Moreover, Robert Leonard has not published the address he delivered at the 2015 HES conference but two related papers.