Ludwig Mises, the Australian connection

Ludwig Mises (1881-1973) is likely to be revealed as one of the sleeping giants of the 20th century. Unlike his Austrian colleague Karl Popper he never touched down on the sacred shores of Australia or any of the outlying islands in the vicinity, not even Tasmania, but there is a strange and fortuitous involvement of an Australian in the translation of his book On Socialism.

The Australian connection is Brian Penton, whose life gives some credence to the old saw that truth is stranger than fiction. Patrick Buckridge wrote a biography of Penton and this is a freestanding piece that gives a fine flavour of the man and his work.

Brian Penton (1904-1951) would surely have achieved the status of the most memorable journalist and commentator in postwar Australia but he died in his prime and left too many enemies to achieve the reputation that he deserved. He was born in Brisbane and left school at the age of fourteen to make an early start in journalism with the Brisbane Courier. At nineteen he travelled to England and worked as a freelance journalist for eighteen months before returning to Australia to join the Sydney Morning Herald.

In 1929 he returned to England, acting as business manager for Jack Lindsay’s Franfolico Press. That episode ended, typically, in prolonged litigation with one of the business partners.
Walking in a London park he met a Hungarian refugee, an economist named Jacques Kahane. They became friends and collaborators in the English translation of a book written in German (1922) on (against) socialism by Ludwig Mises. Kahane was recruited for the task by Professor Lionel Robbins after they became friends while they were students at the London School of Economics.

This brush with the cutting edge of anti-socialist thought served Penton well in later years when he challenged the pillars of the “Australian Settlement” (White Australia, tariffs and central wage fixing) long before they came under widespread attack.

Kahane became a close friend and occasional house guest of Olga and Brian Penton. Each of them dedicated their first books to Kahane, in the case of Brian this was his novel The Landtakers. For Olga it was A Rapid Latin Course with the inscription that she had “hoped that her first book would be a different one”. She was writing a novel while she worked as a Latin teacher to pay the rent.

Ross Parish - a note

Some time ago I began a series looking at the University of New England's contribution to Australia's intellectual tradition. I thought that this might be interesting and helpful because the University occupies a special place as the first university in regional Australia.

I have so far had to put the development of the series on hold because of other pressures. However, in researching a story on David Asimus I came across an obituary of Professor Ross Parish. This post is simply intended to record the link so that I do not lose it.

Some Tasmanian economists

Peter Boettke, at the George Mason University in the US is a member of the Austrian school of economics and social thought. He speculated that people who grew up with some experience of manual work might make better economists than others, or at least they might have a more practical take on the issues that ecomomists are supposed to understand and illuminate by their their research and writing.

I tested out that idea by checking the careers of a number of prominent Australian (not Austrian) economists who had some association with Tasmania (my home state). The results of this study can be found at this link, and I will say up front that the Boettke's idea was strongly supported! Giblin is the outstanding supporter of the thesis, but they are all good.

This is a taste of the Giblin story, the rest is here, with a portrait by Dobell as a bonus!

"GIBLIN, LYNDHURST FALKINER (1872-1951), political economist, was born on 29 November 1872 in Hobart, son of William Robert Giblin, barrister, and his wife Emmely Jean, née Perkins. Educated at The Hutchins School, Hobart, and University College, London, he entered King's College, Cambridge, in 1893, graduating senior optime (mathematics and science) in 1896 (M.A., 1928). He rowed for King's but excelled at Rugby Union, representing not only his college and university but England too. Revisiting King's in 1938, an extraordinary career behind him, he was elected to an honorary fellowship and given the use of Keynes's rooms. When Giblin died the college established a studentship in his name.
After coming down from Cambridge he and a fellow Kingsman joined to prospect for gold in the Cassiar-Stickine district of North British Columbia. The isolated life, if at times adventurous, was always harsh and ultimately meagre of reward; it was essential to work as lumberman, teamster or boatman to help pay one's way. Giblin's correspondence from this period conveys the deprivation, the routine and the eccentric acquaintance of his mining existence. In 1904 he joined the crew of a schooner bound for Australia, but the same year found him once again in London, where inter alia, he helped to teach ju-jitsu. After visiting a Solomon Islands plantation in 1905 he returned to Hobart and set about establishing an orchard. He also taught mathematics and explored Tasmania's high country, measuring more precisely certain peaks. In April 1909, bristling with criticism of his State's recent financial past, Giblin unsuccessfully contested the seat of Franklin as a Liberal Democrat. He then joined the Labor Party, gave elementary lectures to branches on economic subjects, and made his way to the State and Federal executives. In 1913 he won the State seat of Denison. When Labor took office Giblin gained a reputation for independence. He became unofficial adviser to the treasurer J. A. Lyons, persuading him of the need for an inquiry into the public debt. Upon the dissolution of the assembly in 1916 he did not seek re-election.
From March 1909, when he had been commissioned a lieutenant of the Intelligence Corps, Giblin had been active in the citizen forces. In January 1914 he became captain and during 1916 transferred to the 40th Battalion of the Australian Imperial Force. He was wounded at Armentières and Messines, and won the Military Cross in August 1917. Recovered, and promoted major, he fought in the third battle of Ypres, Passchendaele and on the Somme. He received the Distinguished Service Order on 3 June 1918, but a third wounding on 24 August at Bapaume removed him from the war."

University of Newcastle, Cyril Renwick and the Hunter Valley Research Foundation

Musing, I was preparing some very basic historical material on Newcastle University, just a few dates really. However, this got me thinking on some broader issues.

I have begun a series on the University of New England and its contribution to Australia's intellectual tradition. But what about Newcastle?

The roots of this university date back into Australian industrialisation during and after the First World War. This is a university established in a truly industrial centre. How did this affect it?

Like New England, it had an extension and development role in its immediate environment. Professor Renwick and the Hunter Valley Research Foundation are the classic example. But beyond this?

Still on Professor Renwick, school text books can tell us a lot about thought at the time the book was published. Books are linked to curriculum determined by education authorities as well as the author's own views.

Professor Renwick's 1958 book The Economic Pattern An Elementary Text-book for Australian Readers (Longmans Green and Co) was the NSW economics text book for a number of years.

I remember this book. Modern readers would, for example, find its discussion on the institutional role of the union movement strange. It is a snapshot into a different, more polite, Australia.

None of this is very profound. But I would be interested in hearing from readers who can extend the Newcastle story.

Transmission of ideas and the New Zealand Workers Educational Association

Photo: John Bell Condliffe, 1891 - 1981, New Zealand Dictionary of Biography.

I thought it appropriate in this, my first substantive post on this blog, to start with a New Zealand story, one that links two of my interests.

The first is the mechanisms, the channels, through which ideas are transmitted, a process that changes their form.

The second is the reason why such a small country as New Zealand generated so many international academics in fields such as economics and anthropology.

These two are linked. Part of the link lies in the nature of educational development in New Zealand. Part lies in the the New Zealand Branch of the Workers Educational Association.

The comments that follow are personal and do not pretend to be definitive or even rigorous. They are personal impressions, marking a starting point for further discussion.

Growing up in an academic family in New England with New Zealand connections, I knew about the WEA.

My father had been an active member of the WEA. His sister and Vic Fisher, her husband to be, had met at a WEA camp in Auckland. My Uncle Horace had been persuaded by Professor Condliffe to give up a secure position as a school teacher, something that distressed his parents to become a WEA tutor in Westland, the West Coast of New Zealand's South Island.

Professor Condliffe was actually born at Footscray in Melbourne 0n 23 December 1981, moving to New Zealand with his family in 1904. At the age of 16 Condliffe took up a cadetship with the Customs Department in Christchurch, but continued to study part time at Canterbury College.

Now here it is helpful to look at some basic demographics.

In 1907, New Zealand's population was less than a million. New South Wales, by contrast, had a population of between 1.5 and 1.6 million of which something under 39 per cent lived in Sydney.

NSW had just one teacher's college and one university, both located in Sydney. New Zealand, by contrast, already had a number of teacher's colleges and universities spread across the country. It was simply much easier to get educated in New Zealand.

Further, and I am not sure when this began, New Zealand had distance education years before Australia. By the early 1930s, my father as a teacher at a one teacher school did two Master's degrees by distance education, with books coming by train north from Auckland.

During his undergraduate years John Condliffe first met James Hight, the professor of constitutional history and political economy. Hight encouraged Condliffe to study economics, and in 1915 he graduated MA in economics and won a senior university prize. His thesis, published that year in the New Zealand Official Year-book , was the first systematic account of New Zealand's economic history using trade statistics.

The war years were eventful for Condliffe. He was actively involved with Hight in the establishment of the WEA in Christchurch and began the first economics course by lecturing on his thesis topic. During the early years of the WEA in Christchurch and Wellington, he tutored many future Labour leaders: Walter Nash, Peter Fraser, Tim Armstrong, Ted Howard and Harry Holland.

The WEA seems to have filled a real gap in a way not seen in Australia, satisfying a thirst for adult education. So it became a mechanism for the transmission of information and ideas.

In 1915 Condliffe was transferred to the Census and Statistics Office in Wellington as part of an experiment to bring economists into the public service. Now I found this interesting. It would be many years, I think, before Australia had any equivalent.

In 1916 Condliffe was enticed back to Canterbury to a lectureship in economics under Hight, and for the next year he taught a variety of courses: statistics, economic geography, constitutional history, economic theory and economic history, as well as WEA classes.

After a period of war service, in 1919 Condliffe was awarded the Sir Thomas Gresham scholarship at Cambridge University. This was Condliffe's first real taste of university life and it impressed him greatly. Contact with leading British economists, especially J. M. Keynes, reinforced Hight's early teaching that economics should be used for solving economic and social problems.

Here I would add one point to the story drawn from the New Zealand Dictionary of Biography. Scholarships were a key mechanism by which those in the dominions - and they seem to have been especially important in New Zealand - were drawn into broader intellectual life.

At this point I will stop this story and this post, coming back to Professor Condliffe's story in a later post.

Next post in series.

References

Fleming, Grant. 'Condliffe, John Bell 1891 - 1981'. Dictionary of New Zealand Biography, updated 22 June 2007 URL: http://www.dnzb.govt.nz/

For a history of the WEA in New Zealand see.

Statistical data is drawn from various web searches.