Galbraith's Heterodox Teacher: Leo Rogin's Historical Approach to the Meaning and Validity of Economic Theory

摘要

At Berkeley, John Kenneth Galbraith studied with "Leo Rogin, a teacher who established himself firmly in the affections of all my generation. ... In the early thirties, years before the Keynesian revolution, Leo Rogin was discussing Keynes with a sense of urgency that made his seminars seem to graduate students the most important things then happening in the world." Rogin's magnum opus, The Meaning and Validity of Economic Theory: A Historical Approach (1956), published after his death, was widely reviewed, but (like Rogin himself) is now largely forgotten. We examine Rogin's critical, historical approach to economic theory, and Rogin's role in introducing Galbraith in a critical spirit to classical economics, Marx, Keynes (of the Treatise on Money), German historical economics (especially Sombart), and the institutionalist tradition of Rogin's teacher Wesley Mitchell.