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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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