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| Andrew
Glyn: A Towering Figure in Political Economy (1943 -
2007) |
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Andrew Glyn
(1943 - 2007) |
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Andrew
Glyn, who has died from a brain tumour aged 64, was
a fellow of Corpus Christi College, Oxford, from 1969
and an economist with an international reputation. He
was one of the most prolific and influential of a generation
of leftwing socialist scholars in the social sciences.
He was born in Tetsworth, Oxfordshire, where he spent
his early years. Although he came from a privileged
background - his father was a banker - and went to Eton,
Andrew was a lifelong rebel, but one |
whose charm, good humour, personal and intellectual
generosity, along with the rigour of his economic writing,
brought him respect from a much wider spectrum than
those who shared his political outlook.
After studying economics at Oxford University, he worked,
from 1964 to 1966, as a government economist under the
first Wilson Labour government. In 1969, he was appointed
to a fellowship in economics at Corpus Christi, and
over the next 38 years acquired a prodigious reputation
as a teacher. Many talented and progressive undergraduates
and graduate students sought him out as a tutor or supervisor.
What made him such an admired teacher were the clarity
of his explanations, a generous allocation of time to
his students and his enthusiasm. As one former student
remarked: "He knew the difference between challenging
a person's mind and challenging a person's dignity."
His discovery of Marx's writings in the 1960s led him
towards a broader interest in classical economics, which
he retained long after it went out of fashion. Some
of his large bibliography of writings continued and
updated the debates of the classical period.
His best known writing, however, consists of critical
analyses of the recent history of capitalism and a diagnosis
of the condition of the world economy. His books include
British Capitalism, Workers and the Profits Squeeze
(of which I was the co-author) in 1972, Capitalism Since
1945 (of which Phil Armstrong and the late John Harrison
were co-authors) in 1984 and 1991, and, most recently,
his analysis of the nature, malaise and injustices of
today's neoliberal world, Capitalism Unleashed (2006).
Through such writings he challenged orthodox explanations
and injected new rigour into economic debates on the
left.
A good deal of Andrew's written work was produced with
others. He was an ideal colleague to work with - inspirational
but rigorously critical - and he loved to work closely
with other people; personal advancement or recognition
were not important to him. His intellectual generosity
was unbounded and left-wing scholars from all parts
of the world turned to him for advice.
Andrew did not see academic work as an end in itself
but rather as a tool to assist, however indirectly,
the advance towards a more just society. He possessed
a very special talent to unravel the meaning of massive
quantities of economic data, finding patterns which
others missed or misconstrued and directing his analysis
towards refining socialist strategy. This was a feature
of his voluminous work on profitability and on inequality
in capitalist countries.
These skills were put to particularly useful effect
during the miners' strike of 1984-85. He backed up his
instinctive solidarity with the miners by writing a
series of articles and pamphlets unmasking falsehoods
about the financial situation of the mines which were
being purveyed by the Coal Board and the Thatcher government
to justify their policy of massive pit closures. This
was a signal example of rigorous academic work being
used to support working-class struggle.
There was probably a two-way interaction between Andrew's
sympathy with radical social causes and his passion
for jazz, of which his knowledge was encyclopaedic.
Over many decades he built up an extraordinary library
of recordings. Shortly after the diagnosis of his illness,
he told me that, if he had not been an economist, he
would for choice have been a jazz pianist. Perhaps he
would have been a good one. But there are hundreds of
former students, colleagues, collaborators and political
comrades who will be glad that he lived the life he
did and left the piano playing to Bill Evans.
He is survived by his second wife, Wendy Carlin, their
two children, Tessa and Jonathan, and by two children,
Miles and Lucy, from his marriage to Celia Laws.
Ed Miliband writes: Generations of Oxford students have
reason to be grateful for the combination of integrity,
patience, open-mindedness and sense of fun that characterised
Andrew Glyn. It was my privilege to be taught by him
as an undergraduate at Corpus Christi, part of a small
but enthusiastic band that took his classical economic
thought course on the delights of Adam Smith, David
Ricardo and Karl Marx.
After college, he became a friend to me, as he did to
many of his ex-students. The reasons are not hard to
fathom. He had a deep commitment to a fairer and more
just society and strong views about what that meant.
But he combined this with a compelling sense of openness
to the views of others.
Moreover, while Andrew was an analyst, he did not want
simply to understand the world, he wanted it to change.
So he made those involved in what he saw as the compromises
of politics feel he respected them for trying to make
a difference, whatever his disagreements. And when the
facts changed, through experience of the problems of
public ownership or the limits of Keynesian demand management,
Andrew's views did not remain in aspic but evolved too.
That was what made talking and debating with him so
much fun and so illuminating.
Finally, there was his sense of enjoyment. He may have
known a lot about Marx's definition of the Asiatic mode
of production but he did not need to spend all his time
talking about it - or take himself too seriously when
he did. So whether he was discussing jazz, politics,
or, most of all his family, his expressive face lit
up with the warmth and joy that we will all remember.
January 4, 2008.
Source : The Guardian, January 1, 2008. |
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