Mosca: What episodes during your education were the most influential in your later choices? I’m thinking of your years of Catholic schooling, for instance.

Hébert: From my earliest years my formal education was in Catholic parochial schools. When I was about fourteen years old I entered St. Joseph Seminary in Covington, Louisiana, which was operated by Benedictine monks, an order of clerics devoted to high moral values, including education and contemplation. The seminary, an accredited high school, was an adjunct to the monastery. Its setting was rural and isolated. All the students were boarders, not leaving the campus for months at a time. Attendance did not require a commitment to become a priest, but it offered students the opportunity to sort out their vocational aptitudes and intentions.

Seminarians faced demand and supply issues. On the supply side, they were carefully monitored by the teaching monks to determine if they had the “right stuff.” On the demand side, they were given the chance to sample the expectations placed on future priests so as to assess the genuineness of their vocations. The young men were subjected to strict behavioral discipline; exposed to learned, dedicated teachers; and, by necessity, lived in community with each other almost completely isolated from the outside world. Although I left after two years, I believe my character, scholarship, and appreciation for teamwork were shaped and nurtured there. Academic performance was emphasized and self-discipline taught, as much by experience as by rule. In later life I looked back on my unusual early high-school experience as possibly the most formative of my young life.

Mosca: What are your memories of significant experiences as a student? Tell us about some of your teachers who were important in your intellectual career—for example, the economist James P. Payne Jr.

Hébert: I finished my last two years of high school at a small-town parochial school where expectations were lower than what I had become accustomed to at St. Joseph. But I was studious, and upon graduation received just about every academic award in my graduating class. It was, however, a small class of which less than half intended to continue their formal education beyond high school. Before me, my mother was the only family member to obtain a baccalaureate. I was expected to follow in her footsteps. I studied diligently at a public state university, made dean’s list regularly, and decided (without much enthusiasm) to attend law school. I might have done so but for the intervention of the Vietnam War. The compulsory military draft in the United States threw a potential monkey wrench into my plans. The law school at Louisiana State University (LSU) accepted entering students only in the fall of each year. Since I received my baccalaureate mid-academic year, I faced the prospect of having my post-graduate education interrupted by involuntary conscription. Student draft exemptions, soon to become problematic, were still common in those days as enrollment at university was continuous. Therefore, when my senior-year professor of price theory pointed me toward graduate study in economics, I seized the opportunity, accepted an assistantship, and entered the graduate program in economics at LSU in the winter of 1965.

My master’s thesis was on competition between private investor-owned electric utilities in the United States and rural electric cooperatives. The dichotomy between the two institutional suppliers of electricity may be peculiar to the United States, but to me it offered an interesting study of regulated enterprises with and without government subsidies. There were, and are, two elements of competition between the two types of suppliers. The obvious margin of competition involved rates. Less obvious, but in some sense more intense, were disputes about areas served. Territorial conflicts were usually adjudicated by courts of law, which led me to spend many hours in the LSU Law Library, poring over legal proceedings. I completed my requirements for my MS in three semesters and got back on track to enter LSU law school in the fall of 1966, but by then I realized I was more attracted to economics than law, so I entered the doctoral program in economics at LSU and maintained my draft status as a student.

In graduate school I encountered a number of capable professors, but among them, James P. Payne Jr. stood out in my estimation. He directed my master’s thesis and subsequently was co-director of my doctoral dissertation. Payne grew up during the Great Depression on a farm in the Midwest. He was a military pilot in World War II and a former student of David Philip Locklin at the University of Illinois. In the 1960s Locklin was among the leading authorities of transportation economics, and author of the field’s most widely adopted handbook. He must have been the model for Payne’s own academic career. I found Payne to be a font of wisdom on economics, and on life. As an economist Payne was firmly grounded in economic analysis of transportation and beyond that to regulated enterprise in general. He also had a wisdom about him undoubtedly learned from his life experiences. He became a kind of father figure to me and fellow graduate student Bob Ekelund. Our respect and admiration for Payne were among the things we shared as fellow graduate students. Payne never published much that I know of, but he knew what standards of excellence were, and he inculcated those in Ekelund and myself. He was also the most uncompromisingly ethical person I have ever known; and always available for advice and counsel whenever I sought it. Although I did not initially enter the graduate program in economics at LSU with the intention of pursuing a doctorate, Payne encouraged me at every step. I guess he saw something in me that I did not see in myself.

Mosca: Would you tell us something about your doctoral dissertation (1969 to 1970) on Emile Cheysson? How did you choose the subject? Who supervised you? From the outset, how did you deal with questions of method? Were you trained to write history?

Hébert: My friendship with R. B. (Bob) Ekelund Jr., and our joint respect and affection for Jim Payne are intertwined, and both played a part in the development of my dissertation. Ekelund came to LSU to study under William Breit, an accomplished scholar in the history of economic thought who had studied under Walter Adams at Michigan State University. Ekelund arrived at LSU with a master’s degree in hand from St. Mary University in San Antonio, where he was a protégé of Ludwig Mai, a friend of Breit’s who was likewise steeped in the history of economic thought. Breit had a profound influence on Ekelund, and on me as well. He was the initial stimulus that spawned my interest in the history of economic thought, but he left LSU for the University of Virginia not long after I entered the graduate program. Still, if Payne was my academic father, Breit was my academic godfather. He continued to encourage and support me long after he relocated to Virginia. However, Breit’s departure created a quandary for me at LSU. Without a resident specialist in history of thought, who would guide my choice of subject and direct my dissertation? I sought advice from Bob Ekelund, who was two years ahead of me in the program. Ekelund at this time had begun his own dissertation research on Jules Dupuit. He first noticed historical references to Dupuit while using Locklin’s handbook to teach a course in transportation economics at St. Mary. Ekelund directed me to A History of Economic Analysis, where Joseph Schumpeter described a French tradition “adorned by the name of Dupuit” but encompassing other “brilliant French engineers (e.g., Clement Colson and Emile Cheysson) who contributed so substantially to scientific economics.”

Preliminary investigation revealed that Cheysson, an engineer of varied talents, left behind literary fragments of economic thought, some of more interest to what the French call “social economics” but including a monograph that Schumpeter singled out for its powerful originality. I focused on Cheysson’s economic analysis, finding Schumpeter’s praise justified. My task was complicated by the fact that practically all the relevant sources I found were in the French language. I resolved to improve my reading proficiency in French by self-study so as to complete the task before me. Some of Cheysson’s economic and statistical writings had been collected in a two-volume set entitled Oeuvres Choisies, which was long out of print and relatively scarce. Other fragments appeared in scattered publications in obscure journals virtually unknown outside of France.

I began my research under the supervision of Jim Payne. When Bill Campbell joined the LSU faculty to replace Bill Breit, he joined my research project as co-director. As for training in writing history, I had none, but I felt that I could use Schumpeter and Mark Blaug as reasonable guides, especially since I shared their view about the primacy of economic analysis over economic doctrine.

Mosca: Your first publication was in 1972, an article in the Quarterly Journal of Economics titled “A Note on the Historical Development of the Economic Law of Market Areas.” So, your research focused on the history of economic thought right from the start. Can you explain the reason for this immediate overriding interest in history?

Hébert: My first publication was a direct outcome of my dissertation research. Following up on Schumpeter’s intriguing hint about the powerful originality of Cheysson’s analytics, I set out to discover and expose the nature of his originality, contained mostly in a remarkable monograph published in a French engineering journal in 1887. I found, for example, that the law of market areas, reputedly first formalized in the Quarterly Journal of Economics by Frank A. Fetter in 1924, was not only fully adumbrated but exceeded by Cheysson four decades earlier. Cheysson was at one time economic director of the large Schneider munitions factory at Creusot, where he claimed to use his new method—he called it “la statistique géometrique,” which I represent as a kind of proto-econometrics.

Mosca: A few years later (in 1975) you published the handbook A History of Economic Theory and Method (with Ekelund, and I’ll come right back to this co-authorship), which was very successful. The latest edition is from 2014, the sixth after forty years. It has also been translated and republished in many languages. Writing a handbook is a demanding task. How did you get the idea of writing a handbook? What did you feel was lacking in the existing handbooks? What was the innovation you wanted to introduce?

Hébert: Ekelund and I both felt that with the exception of Mark Blaug’s Economic Theory in Retrospect, which even advanced economics students found daunting, there was little analytical rigor in available handbooks on the history of economic thought. The history presented was overwhelmingly doctrinal rather than analytical. While we regarded Schumpeter’s History as the gold standard, we knew its compendious, discursive, and fragmentary style was not suitable for classroom use, even at a graduate level. So, we resolved to write a book more serviceable to the needs of students.

Mosca: What is the conception of history of economic thought expressed in this book? Who inspired you? From the fifth edition, you introduced the “force of ideas” segments. There are also the “method squabbles” segments. Would you explain the reason for these segments?

Hébert: We hoped to approach Schumpeter in erudition and Blaug in rigor, dressing up the historical narrative without sacrificing rigor. We found some of Blaug’s innovations useful, such as his chapter-by-chapter bibliographies. We introduced a similar feature by appending our own “Notes for Further Reading,” which were updated through each subsequent revision. We later added features designed to give more energy to the presentation and amplify the relevance of the history of economic thought to contemporary economics, such as the inserts on “Method Squabbles” and “The Force of Ideas.” Through the method squabbles we hoped to convey the variety of methods used throughout history and how conflicting methods ultimately shaped the dominant paradigm, in keeping with the adage that the past is often prologue to the future.

Mosca: Why do you think it has lasted so long?

Hébert: I doubt that anyone is more surprised about the book’s longevity than Ekelund and myself. I’d like to think that it effectively exploited a market niche somewhere between Schumpeter and Blaug, on the one hand, and the mainly “storytelling” books, on the other.

Mosca: In your books you use the distinction between orthodox (mainstream) and heterodox (radical) thinkers. Why do you find this distinction useful in order to explain the history of economic thought? Was your methodological approach followed up in the historiography of economic thought?

Hébert: Blaug used the same distinction to good effect in his book. Why not maintain what works? Our goal was the same as Blaug’s, i.e., to teach contemporary economic theory in historical context. But we were less concerned with (in his words) “diluting” our treatment by adding historical digressions or biographical coloring. We felt that economics could be “humanized” by exposing the foibles and colorful behavior of great minds in the field. (As an aside, Bill Breit once told me that he liked to invite prominent economists to campus so that his students could see that even the famous had “feet of clay.”) We also wanted to distinguish between method and methodology because the terms are often confounded, to the detriment of understanding. By discussing method, you open a window through which students can evaluate economic theory without the opprobrium of having to declare the “right” way from the “wrong” way to do economics.

Is there a proper historiography of economic thought or simply a proper historiography, period? Merriam-Webster defines “historiography” as the writing of history, by implication leaving the particulars of how to do it up to the writers. Our work has been sometimes criticized as Whig history. I confess I had to look up the term when first encountered, because it was meaningless to me. I learned that the Whig view of intellectual history holds that good ideas from the past are embodied in the common scientific wisdom of the present. I have no quarrel with this statement other than the subjective use of the adjective “good.”

Our approach to historiography is to expose those ideas that failed as well as those that succeeded. “Acceptance” is environmentally determined, but detours in the history of economic thought can be instructive as well. The distinction between orthodoxy and heterodoxy coincides with this view. We believe standards of success and failure are different from standards of “good” and “bad.” In writing history, we accept the former and reject the latter. Another criticism of Whig history is that it systematically ignores or neglects historical context, a criticism that we do not believe is justified in our case. Nevertheless, our historiography perceives the overriding issue to be whether ideas have survival value, i.e., take on a life of their own. The notion of progress may be somewhat arbitrary, but it is a useful concept in writing intellectual history. It shows, among other things, that progress is not inevitable and neither does it always march in a straight line.

Mosca: As well as this handbook, a great many of your other works were co-authored with Robert Ekelund. How did this partnership start?

Hébert: We met and joined forces during my first semester in graduate school. Fate placed us both in the graduate macroeconomics course taught at LSU by Thomas R. Beard. Beard taught the content of Don Patinkin’s Money, Interest and Prices. Ekelund and I had similar reactions to Beard and Patinkin. Beard was an excellent instructor and Patinkin a superb analyst, but we were simultaneously attracted and repelled by Patinkin’s sophisticated analytic rigor. We felt if we didn’t combine our efforts and help each other, we might not survive the course with a passing grade. Two heads are indeed better than one, provided they can act in concert. We joined forces, discovered synergy between us, and started a lifelong friendship based on mutual respect and admiration for whatever talents each of us possessed. Patinkin leaned heavily on history to fuse Walrasian and Pigovian analyses into a novel, general-equilibrium model of the macroeconomy. Though duly awed by his analytic prowess, Ekelund and I joked that Patinkin’s analysis was “much ado about Pigou.” In retrospect, it’s fair to say that our respective academic careers were launched by fate and Patinkin.

Mosca: How did you divide the roles in research?

Hébert: We followed a natural division of labor, specializing according to comparative advantage. In the beginning Ekelund was more interested in, and well read in, the neoclassical period and I was more into earlier developments, including the classical period. We tasked ourselves accordingly. Basically, I took the lead in everything up to Alfred Marshall, and Ekelund took the lead in everything afterwards. However, it was much more of a joint effort than this division implies. We each jointly edited and approved each chapter before considering it “finished.”

Mosca: Apart from Ekelund, you have often written in co-authorship. Why? What are the advantages, and what problems did you encounter?

Hébert: Co-authorship makes sense when each partner brings something different to the table and the partners are able to find a certain synergy between themselves. In my circumstances, too, having been called to numerous administrative duties, a partnership allowed me to leverage my time and talents in stricter academic pursuits. The process worked smoothly between Ekelund and myself because our writing styles are compatible. Many users of our book have mentioned that they couldn’t tell when the writing of one of us ended and the other began. This has always been a point of pride for us.

At the outset we were unable to work in close proximity. In the early 1970s I was in upstate South Carolina (at Clemson University) and Ekelund was in College Station, Texas (at Texas A&M University). As time went on, however, distance proved a minor problem, overcome altogether after Ekelund joined the faculty at Auburn University in 1979.

Mosca: The three themes that appear repeatedly in your work are: history of microeconomic thought, historical aspects of entrepreneurship, and the economics of religion. Let me discuss each of them with you. Why the history of microeconomics?

Hébert: When you focus on behavioral actions that involve individual or small-group decision making, you are in the realm of microeconomics. It is unavoidable. By contrast, macroeconomics focuses on aggregates. It consequently runs the risk of overemphasizing aggregates at the expense of individuals, unless macroeconomic theory is based on proper microeconomic foundations. Adam Smith may have turned the fancy of subsequent economists to macroeconomics, but he understood the primacy of microeconomic foundations. I am not saying that one is more important than the other, merely that the primacy of microeconomics seems self-evident, even from the earliest attempts to systematize economic thought. My interest in entrepreneurship—which is not an aggregative concept—may be connected to this view about the primacy of microeconomics.

Another answer is that, given the historical development or lack thereof of micro and macro, I find microeconomics more satisfying intellectually. Essentially, I think the foundations are more stable than the superstructure it supports.

Mosca: When you started out, was history of microeconomics common?

Hébert: The weakness I perceived in existing history of economic thought handbooks did not arise from imbalance between microeconomics and macroeconomics but from a perceived imbalance in treatment between doctrines and analysis. I mentioned Mark Blaug’s Economic Theory in Retrospect, as an exception. He treats microeconomics and macroeconomics more or less equally, but treats each in more analytical detail than what was customarily found in older texts like Charles Gide and Charles Rist (1948)Footnote ¹ or Lewis H. Haney (1949).Footnote ²

Mosca: Why did you concentrate on French economic thought?

Hébert: The French engineers whom we single out for special treatment were awakened to the need for improved microeconomic tools to deal with the practical concerns of producing public goods, most notably transportation networks. In France the tasks of conceiving, constructing, and maintaining means of transportation were entrusted to state engineers trained at the École Polytechnique and the École des Ponts et Chaussées. These were unique and highly advanced schools established by Napoleon after the Revolution. The engineers trained there were proclaimed by Alfred Marshall as the most capable in the world. They found classical economics lacking as a guide to fulfillment of their professional duties, so they fashioned their own economic toolkit. I think that is a remarkable episode in the history of economic thought. But I don’t think it is fully appreciated, even at this late date.

Mosca: When you started, what was already in existence on French economic thought?

Hébert: Very little existed in English literature. Dupuit received passing mention during some of the potted discussions of the Marginal Revolution, but the full extent of his impact was hard to find, even in his native France. He was mainly missing in action among history of economic thought textbooks. Limited English translations of two Dupuit papers appeared in the early 1950s, in International Economic Papers, but by that time the dominant British tradition in microeconomics was firmly established. The French authors Charles Gide and Charles Rist gave more attention to Antoine-Augustin Cournot in their popular handbook, A History of Economic Doctrines (first English translation, 1915), in which they relegated Dupuit to a few footnotes, among them one crediting him with the first suggestion of final degree of utility (in the Jevonian sense). The point of our Secret Origins of Modern Microeconomics (1999) was to prove that Dupuit and his cohorts at ENPC (École Nationale des Ponts et Chaussées) were about much more than that.

The question remains: Why didn’t Dupuit make a bigger splash among economists in his native country? There are many reasons, I suppose, but one factor usually ignored was that history of economic thought in general was forced underground in France, suppressed by Karl Marx’s overweening influence on leading French intellectuals. I remember perusing bookstore windows in Paris during the late 1970s, finding on display mostly titles on Marxian philosophy and economics. There was little else that would interest a historian of economic thought. Curiously, as the twentieth century wound down, young French scholars led a renaissance in the history of economic thought, creating a milieu ripe for rediscovery of overlooked and forgotten writers.

Mosca: How does economic thought in France differ from Anglo-Saxon thought?

Hébert: In terms of economic analysis, or what Léon Walras called “pure economics,” only minor differences exist. Walras and Marshall were pure theorists first and foremost, who differed on certain perspectives and procedures, but both were committed to the power of analysis and used similar analytic tools to build their respective paradigms. At some turning point, difficult to fix precisely, European and British economists recognized the limitations of classical economics and began to formulate the rudiments of contemporary microeconomics. Conventional wisdom has it that this was mostly an Anglo-Saxon achievement. But there are significant gaps in the usual story. Cournot and Dupuit in France, and Johann Heinrich von Thünen and Hermann Heinrich Gossen in Germany are usually treated as outliers, whereas pride of place is commonly reserved for William Stanley Jevons and Marshall.

Jevons and Marshall clearly deserve credit, but they did not operate in a vacuum. The German and French part of the story has been mostly forgotten, with the exception of Erich Streissler and ourselves. This neglect from the normal channels of economic inquiry was exacerbated in France due to the role of France’s peculiar institutions of higher learning, in particular the system of grand écoles set up by Napoleon. In France technocrats were entrusted with the provision of public goods, and those technocrats were educated at the École Polytechnique and the École des Ponts et Chaussées. The graduates of these institutions were men of practical affairs mobilized by state pressure, professional imperatives, and specialized training. In such a milieu, modern microeconomics was born out of necessity.

Mosca: In your 1999 book, Secret Origins of Modern Microeconomics, you argue that engineers have contributed more than economists in constructing microeconomic theory. Were the contents of this book absorbed by the literature? In your 2016 review of Heinz D. Kurz (Economic Thought: A Brief History) published by EH.Net, it would seem that they were not recognized sufficiently.

Hébert: Allow me to qualify the claim you are making on my behalf. I do not believe that engineers contributed more analytical tools than economists in constructing microeconomic theory. Rather, I believe that at a critical juncture in intellectual history, engineers, particularly French engineers, advanced microeconomic theory more rapidly and with more originality than their counterparts from the “political economy” ranks in France or Great Britain. That is the basic claim we made in Secret Origins.

Were the contents of Secret Origins fully absorbed by the economics literature? It is hard to say. When I wrote my review of Heinz Kurz’s brief history of economic thought a few years ago, I did not have a firm grasp of the market he was aiming for. I generally respect an author’s subjective choice of what to include and what to omit. But it is disappointing to find favored interpretations of the origins of neoclassical economics that resist change this late in the game. Perhaps I am still basking in the afterglow of Blaug’s stark admonition almost two decades ago. But I would consider it a healthy development for our discipline if those who resist revision of the standard history would at least recognize, much less confront, the evidence we present.

Mosca: Another theme in your work is the historical aspect of entrepreneurship. Why entrepreneurship? This is the subject of your 1982 book (The Entrepreneur: Mainstream Views and Radical Critiques, co-authored with Albert N. Link). This too was a pioneering publication, and this book too is historical. Where did the idea come from? What is the central argument?

Hébert: I grew up the eldest of six children, raised in an extended family comprised of parents, grandparents, siblings, uncles, and cousins all living under the same roof. We were taught self-reliance as a matter of course. In economics the epitome of self-reliance is entrepreneurship. So, to a certain extent, my interest in the subject was natural and inevitable. My exposure to neo-Austrian economics, particularly the works of Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich Hayek, and Israel Kirzner, made me keenly aware of the central importance of the entrepreneur; and my familiarity with the history of economic thought sensitized me to the lack of historical treatment of the subject. Separate discussions about this with Kirzner and with George L. S. Shackle, whom I met at an history of economic thought conference at Cambridge University almost four decades ago, convinced me that the time was right for a serious historical treatment of the elusive entrepreneur. When Al Link, a fellow faculty member at Auburn University, expressed an interest in the subject as well, we decided to team up to write The Entrepreneur: Mainstream Views and Radical Critiques. Shackle wrote the foreword in his elegant, concise, inimitable style. The central argument, which became increasingly obvious as our research advanced, is that while many writers, beginning with Richard Cantillon, accede the centrality of the entrepreneur, there are almost as many notions of his function as there are authors who have written on the subject. Failure to reach consensus on this important subject has, in our opinion, hindered its integration into mainstream economics. Schumpeter may have enforced his concept of entrepreneurship on the commonly held notion, but it differs from the concepts advanced by Cantillon, Jean-Baptiste Say, Jeremy Bentham, Marshall, Frank Knight, Kirzner, Ted Schultz, and many others. There is also the issue of squeezing a dynamic force such as entrepreneurship into the comparative statics box of economic theory.

Mosca: Twenty years later you (and your co-author) revisited the subject in A History of Entrepreneurship. What are the main innovations in this new edition? What have you changed your minds about?

Hébert: The Entrepreneur did not make much of a splash when first published in 1982. Then it was a mere ripple on the historical pond. My interest in the concept was fanned by the logic of Kirzner and the neo-Austrians. Our book may have quickened interest in a subject already competing for attention. The Entrepreneur was translated into Japanese in 1984, but I did not receive feedback on its impact there. Our original publisher, Praeger, published an expanded second edition in 1988, but it had fallen out of print by the end of the millennium. With the copyright reverting to Link and myself, Link tirelessly promoted republication in easily accessible forms. The book’s second coming appeared as a monograph in the Foundations and Trends in Entrepreneurship Series (NOW Publishers, 2006), and its third as No. 104 in Routledge Studies in the History of Economics (2009). A decided uptick in the number of citations to these replications suggests that interest in entrepreneurship has continued to grow. In 2019 I received a request from an Iranian national asking permission to translate the manuscript into Farsi and Kurdish. Naturally I gave him the green light.

Mosca: You organized for six years the African-American Entrepreneurship Summit at Auburn University (from 1994 to 1999). Would you tell us about the motivations and the effects of that experience?

Hébert: After finishing my second term as department head at Auburn University in 1993 and successfully launching a PhD program in economics there, I was named the Russell Foundation Endowed Professor of Economics, Emeritus Professor of Entrepreneurial Studies, which involved a small stipend for promoting education in the field of entrepreneurship. I joined forces with Keenan Grenell, a young faculty member in the political science department, to promote self-help and entrepreneurship among a group of people we felt was underserved. The program was modest, but we were able to attract speakers of local and national interest, as well as state and local participants from minority segments of the population. The program ran annually for a number of years. We were not able to formally measure its effectiveness, but indications are that participants gained from the experience. Auburn University recognized our efforts in 1996 by bestowing on us its Excellence in Outreach Award.

Mosca: Then you dealt with the economics of religion, applying economic principles to the study of religious institutions. The 1996 book (Sacred Trust: The Medieval Church as an Economic Firm, co-authored with Ekelund and Robert Tollison) is also a historical book: it is focused on the institution of the Roman Catholic Church in the Middle Ages. Here, you use economic history as a stylized fact that can be modeled with microeconomic tools. What was the impact of this book? Did it give rise to a new research field?

Hébert: Sacred Trust is essentially a prequel to The Marketplace of Christianity (2006), which Ekelund, Tollison (now deceased), and I consider our crowning achievement in the economics of religion. The impact of the two books is difficult to judge. The steadily growing expansion of literature on the subject attests to burgeoning interest in the economics of religion. The interest for our research did not come from religious ardor but from a shared, abiding interest in how economic decisions are influenced by institutional structure. The medieval church was the dominant institution of the Middle Ages, surpassing monarchy in its scope and reach. Gary Becker lit the fire in extending economic analysis to “non-economic” phenomena. Oliver Williamson pulled back the curtain on how organizational structure influences economic order, and Douglas North illuminated major episodes of history with his “new institutional economics.” These various developments came together to define our approach to the economics of religion. The project began, however, as an outgrowth of Ekelund’s and Tollison’s attempt to alter the conventional interpretation of mercantilism, which they unveiled in Mercantilism as a Rent-Seeking Society (1981) and expanded in Politicized Economies (1997). Both these works explicated the role of rent-seeking in defining major turning points in economic history. The same approach, we conjointly reasoned, could be turned to good effect in understanding the episodic turning points of church history.

There is a treasure trove of documentation within the Vatican archives, much of it inaccessible until recently, which we were able to use to good effect in building our argument. The project, like many of its sort, started off slowly, with various co-authored papers on usury (Journal of Law, Economics & Organization, 1989); the Crusades (Journal of European Economic History, 1992); purgatory—following a suggestion by History of Economics Society past president David Levy (Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, 1992). These papers and more were collected, compiled, and published as Sacred Trust (1996). As our research unfolded we wrote papers that attempted to explain various episodes of organizational behavior, including an oft-cited paper on the economic origins of the Reformation (Journal of Political Economy, 2002); another on the Counter-Reformation (Economic Inquiry, 2004); and so forth. These piecemeal contributions were aggregated and assembled, embellished and brought to a crescendo in The Marketplace of Christianity (2006), which was translated into Italian two years after its initial publication.

When we started our piecemeal quest to shine a light on the economics of the medieval church, the field was new and not always taken seriously. Our approach was once denounced as “Beckerism on steroids.” But Becker received a Nobel Prize for his innovations, a distinction not shared by his critics. Besides, the field was gaining momentum from sociologists Rodney Stark and Roger Finke, and economist Larry Iannaccone. Moreover, the American Economic Association has acknowledged the legitimacy of the subject by adding it to the AEA/JEL Index of Economic Articles. Religion is now a sub-category under the broader classification of Cultural Economics/Economic Sociology/Economics of Anthropology. It is gratifying to have had a hand in this development.

Mosca: If we divide up your work into the various decades, it seems that history of economic thought was the leading research topic right from the 1970s; then in the 1980s entrepreneurship arrived without replacing history of economic thought; then in the 1990s religion was added to the previous two; and after that, the three themes were all continued. There is great continuity. But are there any issues on which you have changed your mind over the years, aspects or approaches that you have given up? I am interested to know whether, despite the obvious continuity, there are ideas that you have changed over time, and if so, for what reasons.

Hébert: The continuity in my body of research came less from conscious design than from simply following my interests. I never had a master plan or highly focused mission. Throughout my career I have tried to remain open to ideas and themes of many stripes. I am a bit of a contrarian and attracted to well-reasoned arguments that go against conventional wisdom—or, as Jevons put it, ideas that challenge the “noxious influence of authority”—mainly because I think this is the way that science advances. I value and admire originality in intellectual thought, but I don’t consider my own contributions to the history of economic thought highly original. I often rely on others for intellectual stimulation, but once focused on a topic, I enjoy the “hunt” for supporting evidence, the challenge of constructing a clear and concise “story,” and the gratification that comes from publication. My driving ambition has always been to do the best possible job at whatever undertaking I choose. For that reason, I probably spend an inordinate amount of time in an effort to get things right the first time, i.e., prior to going to press. I can’t think of anything I would change at this point. That does not mean I never will, but at this moment I’m content to say I have no regrets.

Mosca: Besides Dupuit, you have written about Cheysson, Edwin Chadwick, Cantillon, Adam Smith, Marshall, and Frédéric Bastiat. How have these past economists influenced your thought? What tools have they given you to interpret the economic situation?

Hébert: My interests led me to various writers, but I was abIe to learn from each. The contributions of Dupuit and Cheysson taught me the importance of advances in allied fields that can be brought to bear on economic theory, and the importance of international transmissions of ideas. Cantillon’s work has a Newtonian cast to it, illustrating the pivotal nature of entrepreneurial activity in understanding market dynamics. Smith and Marshall were system builders par excellence. Bastiat and Chadwick stand somewhat apart. Bastiat was more journalist than theorist, yet he demonstrated a profound capacity to understand economics at a deep level and to separate the primal from the superficial. The prevalence of unintended consequences, which he shrewdly and persistently emphasized, is an important lesson for any economist engaged in formulating public policy. Chadwick, too, was less of a theorist than an administrative genius. An ardent Benthamite, he deeply understood how incentives affect economic behavior and how institutional changes can be manipulated—often quite easily—to affect public policy.

Mosca: In your opinion, what is the specificity of the research of historians of economic thought? What distinguishes and characterizes the scope and method of research of a historian of economic thought?

Hébert: Specificity of research in the history of economic thought is not something to which I have given much thought. John Stuart Mill said that one is not likely to be a good economist if he is nothing else. Perhaps a good economist should also be a historian, or a mathematician, or even an artist or musician. Economics in general embraces a wide range of human behavior that can be studied in many different ways. The history of economic thought is a sub-field of general economics, and general economics seems be expanding, not contracting, its boundaries. I’m not sure what is to be gained by putting boundaries on what historians can and cannot do. Hence, I find specificity an elusive concept as it pertains to the history of economic thought. What distinguishes the scope and method of history of economic thought is that it is first and foremost intellectual history, as compared with eventual history. Beyond that I see no boundaries. I am not a trained historian, but I see no impediments to engaging in historiographical pursuits.

Mosca: Do you feel that the work of a historian of economic thought is closer to that of economists or that of economic historians? You have covered both fields. What about historians of the social sciences, and of the hard sciences?

Hébert: In my view history is what historians do; a process that can be applied fruitfully to any intellectual specialization. Economic history is history that focuses on economic events and/or processes. History of economic thought is history that focuses on intellectual ideas and analyses that have occurred over time. The two may be related but can be investigated from different perspectives. As I indicated before, my interest is primarily in intellectual history and what that involves.

Mosca: In your study of the history of economic thought, what methodological considerations guided you?

Hébert: With regard to method, Schumpeter was my guide. With regard to pedagogy, Blaug was my beacon. In terms of inspiration, both had a profound impact on me. I searched for a style, not necessarily a method, that incorporated the best of both.

Mosca: How did you organize your research?

Hébert: The first step in any research project is to identify the subject of investigation. The next step I usually took was to make an outline of conceivable topics or issues suggested by targeted treatment of the subject. Then began the arduous task of reading sources and refining the outline. Refinements can be as elaborate or as spare as one chooses. Whichever form it takes, this becomes the organizational plan of ideas, which must eventually be formed into a concise narrative.

Mosca: How did you find the sources?

Hébert: You start reading, looking for clues to other sources that lead to clues to additional sources, and so on. In the successful search for sources, one clue usually leads to another. Sometimes a search leads to a detour; other times, a dead end. Perseverance is key. The information revolution ushered in by the digital age has been of tremendous help in this regard.

Mosca: What use did you make of the sources?

Hébert: I took notes on various sources and made a running bibliography so I could return to the sources as necessary. I often used index cards for this purpose, making rearrangement of the information easier, which facilitated the construction of footnotes and the final compilation of the bibliography.

Mosca: How much importance did you place on archival research?

Hébert: For the French engineers I was fortunate that Louisiana has a strong French cultural heritage that was reflected in LSU’s library holdings. I found many nineteenth-century French sources there that probably existed in few American libraries. At the outset of my dissertation research, I spent many hours in the basement of the university library annex where the old French journals were archived. It was an uncomfortable environment because the basement was not properly climate-controlled or lighted, which led to self-imposed restrictions on the length of my visits. While in Paris at ENPC, I utilized what archival material was available. The French librarians and assistants were responsive to my requests. One of them was so sympathetic to my mission that on her own initiative she showed me Dupuit’s handwritten manuscript of his graphic rendition of the demand/utility curve.

Mosca: Is there more emphasis on “the power of … analysis,” as you wrote in the introduction to Cantillon (2010, p. 6)?Footnote ³

Hébert: As I’ve indicated previously I have always been more concerned with the history of economic analysis than with the history of economic doctrine. So yes, the power of analysis for any given writer or group of writers was what I emphasized in my research. This particular focus of mine has always been uppermost.

Mosca: Let’s talk now about your experiences as visiting research scholar. What motivated you to undertake these experiences? What significant encounters did you have during your visiting periods? What impact did visiting the places where the figures you studied had lived have on your research?

Hébert: My Fulbright Award in Paris in 1995 gave me the opportunity to do more intensive research on Dupuit, his fellow engineers, and the institutional structure of the École Nationale des Ponts et Chaussées, which played a key role in the professionalization of French engineers who pioneered modern microeconomics. It also gave me the opportunity to interact with like-minded French scholars who helped me understand the peculiar structure of French higher educational institutions. The research I did under the auspices of the Fulbright Foundation culminated in the book (Secret Origins, 1999) I wrote with Ekelund.

In the immediate post-WW II era, French specialists in the history of economic thought almost disappeared under the (noxious?) influence of Karl Marx. I am fortunate that I got to witness rebirth of interest in the field early in my academic career. At that stage of my development, it was an affirming circumstance. I made lasting friendships with French scholars like André Lapidus and Claude Menard, and their students and colleagues at Paris I; friendships that I treasure to this day.

After a twenty-five-year affiliation with Auburn University, I took the (mainly economic) decision to retire from its faculty, with a view to returning to my native state of Louisiana. Consequently, I accepted a visiting position at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette (ULL), from 2000 to 2005. It was a kind of homecoming for me and brought my wife and me closer to family and friends after a long absence. We completed the transition as the year 2000 began, sadly leaving behind many friends and associates in Auburn.

ULL operated a cooperative teaching program with the French-American Center for International Management at the University of Caen in Normandy. During Easter break in 2004 I taught a short course in intermediate price theory to graduate MBA students at Caen at the Institut d’Administration des Entreprises de Caen. The experience not only exposed me to European students but also afforded the opportunity to observe the structure and operation of a regional university outside the centralized Paris educational nexus.

While at ULL I received an invitation from Professor Marc Gaudry, director of the University of Montreal’s Agora Jules Dupuit, to present a paper to faculty and students about the life and works of Dupuit. I accepted the invitation and made the presentation (available online as part of the Agora’s conference series on Dupuit).Footnote ⁴ My visit was limited to a few days; it did not rise to the level of a visiting appointment in the usual sense of the phrase. My brief visit made me aware of the legacy of Dupuit’s thought in French-speaking Canada.

Mosca: You have been a member of doctoral and post-doctoral examining committees, as well as of scientific committees, in French institutions. How were your relations over the years with French scholars?

Hébert: My relations over the years with French scholars have been cordial and productive. I was always received warmly on my visits there. During my Fulbright term in residence, André Lapidus arranged for me to teach a graduate course at Paris I, helped secure travel funds so that I could accompany him to a history of economic thought conference in Rotterdam, and introduced me to many of his doctoral students.

Mosca: Did you find an open, collaborative attitude?

Hébert: Absolutely.

Mosca: Did you always receive full recognition?

Hébert: The work that Ekelund and I did on the French engineers did not go unnoticed in France. By virtue of the publication of Secret Origins, I was invited to give a commemorative lecture at the École Nationale des Ponts et Chausseés at the outset of the new millennium. I was also asked to be a member of a PhD thesis committee by a French student writing on Dupuit. I know through my circle of friends in Paris who included me in their conferences and gatherings that my contributions were recognized and appreciated.

In the Anglo-Saxon world, however, our contribution has been less obtrusive, with the singular exception of the late Mark Blaug’s ringing endorsement. Writing in the Journal of Economic Perspectives (2001) almost two decades ago, Blaug re-examined the origins of the so-called Marginal Revolution in light of Erich Streissler’s review of the early German writers and the work published by Ekelund and myself on the French econo-engineers. He concluded: “Putting Streissler together with Ekelund and Hébert destroys the usual history of economic thought textbook account of the Marginal Revolution as a curiously isolated event in Manchester, Vienna and Lausanne, which then took three or four or even five decades to pervade the economics profession as a whole. Indeed, the new historical revision makes it even more difficult to explain why the marginalist revolution took so long to succeed. How can an evolution of 30 to 40 years be called a revolution?”Footnote ⁵

Of course, some scholars don’t like to see their pet ideas and convictions overturned. So far as I can determine, Blaug’s exhortation has had little impact on conventional histories.

Mosca: Your publications include numerous book reviews. Do you still feel this is an effective way of spreading information on books published? Or is it more a way of expressing critiques and opinions on recent publications?

Hébert: I think book reviews are a useful and effective way of spreading information on new books published. Academics are not exempt from time constraints, and a balanced summary of a book’s strengths and weaknesses can serve as a useful guide to the busy scholar who must inevitably screen which books deserve closer attention. A complementary result is that it gives authors useful feedback on their work. Reviewers’ criticisms and opinions are usually polite, but there are exceptions.

Mosca: What were your relations with the Von Mises Institute? Today you are listed as an adjunct scholar, and from 1983 to 2000 you were on the institute’s academic staff.

Hébert: My relations with the Von Mises Institute have always been in an advisory capacity. When I was head of the economics department at Auburn University, I was instrumental in bringing the institute to Auburn. The nature of the arrangement was that the institute be allowed to affiliate with the university without becoming a part of the university administration and budget. It was a move that anticipated mutual benefit. In return for its proximity to an academic base, the institute was expected to encourage and support the research efforts of faculty members while also providing financial assistance to deserving graduate students. I’m not sure if or how the original arrangement has changed, but my impression is that the institute has prospered in Auburn. I no longer maintain any direct interaction with the institute, but I continue to follow their actions from afar.

Mosca: In more general terms, what are your thoughts about the Austrian School? You are on the advisory board of the Journal of Austrian Economics. To what extent do you support their arguments?

Hébert: The Austrian School encompasses several generations of thinkers, which makes it subject to different interpretations. The first generation of Austrians (Carl Menger, Friedrich von Wieser, and Eugen Böhm-Bawerk) established a neoclassical approach to economics that ran alongside Marshallian theory but in different channels. It spawned a second generation (Mises, Schumpeter), which took inspiration from the first and advanced innovations of their own. A third generation followed (Hayek, Fritz Machlup, Kirzner, Murray Rothbard) that added important insights on the nature of competition, markets as information mechanisms, entrepreneurship, advertising as demand discovery, and time preference. A derivative group has coalesced around this third generation of Austrians into what I prefer to call “neo-Austrians.” With a few exceptions, I find this group of young Turks somewhat clannish and doctrinaire, but I support their emphasis in economic discourse on certain Austrian themes, such as spontaneous order, the nature of competition as process, entrepreneurship, the subjective nature of economic costs (also advanced by James M. Buchanan), and the role of time in economic analysis. I reject their hostility to neoclassical economics; and I am ambivalent about, but mostly sympathetic to, their methodological individualism.

Mosca: Now it is widely acknowledged that Cantillon’s theory has a lot in common with the Austrian tradition. Was it your 1985 article (“Was Richard Cantillon an Austrian Economist?”) that started this recognition?

Hébert: I don’t think I started this recognition, but I might have accelerated it. Remember, my 1985 article was an invited essay published alongside several others testifying to the vibrancy of Cantillon’s contributions more than two centuries after his death. My article made explicit what some Austrians, and possibly non-Austrians, recognized. Hayek had credited Cantillon with what we now call the “Cantillon Effect,” which explains the overall effectiveness of money injections according to how money enters the economy. Still, I don’t think anyone had matched up the confluence of ideas between Cantillon and the Austrians to the extent I did, at least not in published form.

Mosca: In March 2000 you were one of the 539 economists to sign the Open Letter to President Clinton against plans to control health care prices. What made you sign? In general, have you ever had a keen interest in politics? Have you had political experiences or have you ever been tempted to enter into politics? Has your political vision influenced your research choices as a historian of economic thought?

Hébert: I felt that there was safety in numbers. At least 538 other economists felt as I did that price controls impede the function and operation of markets, thereby leading to suboptimal resource allocation! I view my signature then as a statement of economic integrity, not a flirtation with politics. Being a two-term department head in a contemporary state-supported university exposed me to all the politics I care to encounter during my lifetime! I am actually more repelled by politics than attracted to it.

Allow me a broad comparison, using terms from game theory commonly understood by economists. Formulating public policy economics involves at least the quest to find and achieve Pareto Optimality—or what is loosely described as “win-win situations”—in the context of a positive-sum game. Politics, by contrast, typically proposes “solutions” that yield win-lose outcomes, within the context of a zero—or negative—sum game. Thomas Sowell claims, rightly in my view, that in economics there are no solutions, only trade-offs. Yet, politics proposes “solutions” that are almost never achievable and don’t deliver what is expected. Politicians focus on intentions rather than results. Trade-offs cannot be acknowledged without undermining the unachievable promises that are made to solicit votes. Economics may suffer still from the “dismal science” label hung on it many years ago, but it is more realistic.

I would go so far as to advocate economics as a necessary antidote to politics. When I chose to study economics over fifty years ago, the overriding concern of economists was poverty. Wealth and economic growth were perceived as the means to mitigate poverty. The extent to which world poverty has been reduced is grossly misunderstood today, as Hans Rosling recently demonstrated in his powerful book Factfulness (2018). Yet, as I survey the world today, I find that many politicians behave as though wealth and economic growth are the problem, not the solution; and I see this as indicative of an intent to turn economics upside down.

Mosca: You have filled many institutional roles, mainly at university, but also in the City of Auburn. Which experience taught you most as a scholar? And, conversely, which ideas were most useful to you in those positions?

Hébert: Many universities in the United States were initially established in small towns and villages, giving rise to a “town and gown” environment. I felt impelled to volunteer my services not only to the institution that employed me but also to the city in which I lived. Thus, I was president of my local church parish council in Auburn; member of a municipal planning committee for economic development; two-time head of the economics department at Auburn University; member and chair of AU’s Graduate Council, head of several faculty search committees, scholarship committees, and more; trustee of the Southern Economics Association; and president of the History of Economics Society (HES). I learned from these experiences the value of administrative and interpersonal skills, teamwork, and the frustrations of group decision making. From a purely academic standpoint, however, I considered these ancillary activities extracurricular.

Mosca: One of your institutional roles was president of HES in 1991–92. Would you tell us about your experience as president of HES? Did you introduce any innovations during your year in the presidency? Did you encounter any particular difficulties? What advice can you give future presidents?

Hébert: The circumstances under which I ascended to the office of president were peculiar, to say the least. In 1991 Dudley Dillard was the society’s president-elect. Early in that year he began to plan and organize the eighteenth annual HES meeting, which was the responsibility of the office. As was customary, his employer, the University of Maryland, was designated the host institution. However, before he could complete the duties of his office, Dudley suffered a serious heart attack, which forced him to resign his position. In what I suspect was mild panic, S. Todd Lowry, reigning HES president, telephoned me, explained the situation, and asked if I would accept the executive board’s decision to name me the president-elect as Dudley’s replacement. The irregularity of those circumstances made me slightly uncomfortable, but Professor Lowry assured me that it was just a matter of time before I would have been elected president anyway. Clearly, he emphasized, the emergency deserved emergency measures. I pushed aside my trepidation and accepted, only to learn that I was expected to organize the proceedings from Auburn even though the conference was to be held in Maryland. I never pressed Todd on every detail leading to my selection, but I am still now convinced that I am the only quasi-legitimate past president in the history of HES.

The meetings were held in June of 1991 in College Park, Maryland. Somehow, I managed to execute my newly assigned duties from a distance, thanks to the competent staff Professor Dillard had already enlisted. I met Dudley on one of my planning visits prior to the meetings, accepted his gratitude for stepping up as his replacement, thanked him for the work he had already done, and wished him good health. Sadly, he died in August 1991 from the heart ailment that robbed him of his rightful presidency.

The experience taught me something of crisis management but left little time for long-range planning during my term of office. My year as president-elect was consumed with organizational details, and much of my presidential term was spent fussing over papers that had to be selected, compiled, and carefully edited for publication, which was then secured for HES under annual contract with Edward Elgar. HES provided no post-conference editorial assistance, so I had to go it alone. Volume 9 of the Perspectives on the History of Economic Thought series was finally published in 1993, by which time planning was underway for the twentieth annual HES meetings. My year as president of HES is mostly a blur. Circumstances had made me mostly a caretaker. With relief I handed the reins over to Karen Vaughn when my term expired.

Mosca: What recent theoretical developments have given you the most satisfaction and what has disappointed you most, in the direction taken by economic thought over your lifetime?

Hébert: A brief look at the table of contents of Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations conveys its enormous scope and reach. Smith dealt with markets, religion, politics, morals, literature, history, and many other matters. Yet, ironically, his foundational principle, specialization and division of labor, has enriched the field by technical advances but allowed some themes to languish. I am encouraged, therefore, by new developments in consumption theory that emphasize goods as bundles of utility-producing characteristics (à la Kelvin Lancaster et al.); new advances in price theory that incorporate “full price” measures (à la Becker et al.); new behavioral economics that encourage “happiness” theories (e.g., Bruno Frey and Richard Layard); novel concepts of search, information, and signaling; and logical extensions of economic analysis to religion, arts, culture, politics, bureaucracy, and more—all of which suggest that economics is moving closer to the kind of integration of the social sciences envisioned centuries ago by Adam Smith and John Stuart Mill.

There are, however, pitfalls to be avoided. A half-century ago Wassily Leontief, in his American Economic Association presidential address, cautioned that the scientific means by which contemporary economists try to solve practical problems may be palpably inadequate for the task. As a pioneer of input-output analysis, Leontief is clearly not hostile to mathematics per se. Yet he warned that uncritical enthusiasm for mathematical formulation beyond its legitimate purpose tends to conceal the ephemeral, substantive content of any argument behind the formidable facade of mathematical symbols. He feared that the weak and all too slowly growing empirical foundation of economic theory cannot support its proliferating superstructure.

Fifty years have passed, yet I don’t see encouraging signs that contemporary economics took Leontief’s message to heart. Maybe returning to the historical roots of economics can help restore and maintain the kind of balance in economic inquiry that Leontief advocated. Historians of economic thought can help by engaging in the ongoing practice of studying and evaluating past performances of the great thinkers.

Mosca: What problems are you currently engaged with and what ideas are you working on now?

Hébert: I am currently coming to grips with the ageing process, seeking to maintain an active mind while gradually withdrawing from purely academic pursuits. I left the classroom in 2005, but I referee articles occasionally and write book reviews from time to time. I have no “bucket list” of new or unfinished projects, but I am currently thinking about the role of rent-seeking as a factor leading to the French Revolution, in conjunction with Bob Ekelund and Mark Thornton. My main historical interests, however, have shifted and become more personal. I’ve taken an interest in genealogy. As I face my eighth decade, I justify this new passion by convincing myself that every mortal has at least some curiosity about his/her ancestral roots.