Cultivating Catallactics: Laurence Moss as Scholar and Mentor

Abstract

With the premature passing of Laurence Moss, the field of history of economic thought has lost one of its great practitioners and mentors. Larry was not only an outstanding scholar in the field in his own right, but in his capacity as an officer in HES and as an editor of the AJES, he was a mentor to my generation of scholars entering the field. Put simply, Larry was a generous man who sought out and encouraged young scholars in economics to think seriously about the history and methodology of the discipline. I believe I first met Larry in the summer of 1985, when the HES meetings were held at GMU. I was at the time what one might term a hard-core aspiring Austrian and libertarian I haven't lost my enthusiasm for those ideas, but I think I am more tolerant of alternative enthusiasms today than I was at that time. Larry shared an enthusiasm with me for those ideas, but also understood the value of critical scholarship and professional standards far better than I did at that time. I was a student of Larry's long-time friend Karen Vaughn, and Karen introduced me at those meetings to many of the established individuals in the field of history of thought and methodology, such as Warren Samuels, Mark Perlman, A. W. Coats, and others. I was very familiar with Larry both from his work (he published not only on Austrian economics but also on anarcho-capitalism) and from his editing role in the Institute for Humane Studies series of works in Austrian economics. Larry was also part of the folklore of modern Austrian economics. As a precocious teenager, he had attended some lectures of Ludwig von Mises at NYU, and at one point asked Mises what it took to prepare oneself to be a world-class Mises responded that the economist must master philosophy, mathematics, and history; possess a working knowledge of the natural sciences; know several languages; and read deeply in the history of the discipline. Moss supposedly replied, Professor Mises, that is too hard. At which point Mises replied: Nobody asked you to be an economist. Larry went from being that precocious teenager to earning his undergraduate degree from Queens College and his Ph.D. from Columbia University; later, he would earn a J.D. from Suffolk University. Larry taught economics at the University of Virginia, Tufts University, and Babson College, and earned a reputation as an outstanding teacher of economics--even using magic tricks in class to communicate economic ideas. Larry's original work as a scholar was on the non-Ricardian British economists--Longfield, Whately, Wicksteed, and so forth. These economic thinkers emphasized that the proper subject of economics was exchange relationships and the institutions within which exchange takes place. Whately termed this study catallactics--the study of exchange. Mises, Hayek, Buchanan, Coase, and Kirzner are the most adamant adherents to this approach in contemporary economics. This raises an important point I want to stress about Larry. Obviously, a precocious teenager is drawn to the lectures of Ludwig von Mises for reasons other than praxeology and catallactics. Larry had strong libertarian priors, and he was drawn to the Austrian school because of those priors. But he never once let those priors drive his scholarship. And part of his mentoring to those who like him were drawn to the Austrian school was to push them to think economic scholarship first and to constantly hold those libertarian priors at bay. Larry kept an arm's length from the Austrian movement, yet was always recognized as someone connected. In this sense, his position was similar to Karen Vaughn's or Bruce Caldwell's, as a scholar who is primarily known for his contributions to the broader field of history of economic thought, but who in that work has done much to contextualize and advance the ideas of the Austrian school of economics. In Larry's case, this was the exchange paradigm, as opposed to allocation paradigm, in the history of economics, and the importance of institutions in shaping the exchange process in historical time. …