H Maas

Biographic Data

ID49743
NAMEH Maas
GIVEN NAMESH
FAMILY NAMEMaas
SIGNATUREMAAS H
AFFILIATIONSUniversity of Lausanne
ORCID0000-0002-5094-0477
VERIFIEDYes
TOTAL WORKS35
TOTAL CITATIONS57
AUTHOR COUNT35
EDITOR COUNT0
FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR1999
LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR2024
H-INDEX5

  • Smoke on the Water: Hes at 50 and the Non-Neutrality of History

    Open AccessH MaasARTICLEJournal of the History of…2024

    Recently, I participated in the thesis defense on an eminently local subject, political economic writing in the eighteenth century in the cantons of Vaud (where I live and teach) and Berne (which at the time had occupied the Canton of Vaud) in Switzerland. I will spare you the details of this 700-pages-thick thesis, with an appendix of another 200 pages, which was not even about political economic writing in all of the Swiss Federation, but only …

  • Marking Time: Marshall's Search for Narrative Explanatory Coherence

    H MaasARTICLEHistory of Political Economy2023References: 10

    It is well known that Marshall had great difficulty in organizing his work after the Principles. The promised second volume never came, and for the books that eventually were published, Industry and Trade (1919) and Money, Credit, and Commerce (1923), Marshall was at pains to find the right mode of expression for his research. In the introduction to the Principles, Marshall had explained his reliance on partial equilibrium analysis and, more gene…

  • Seeing Science: The Art of Making the Invisible Visible

    H MaasARTICLEIsis2023

  • Jhet Interviews: Margaret Schabas

    Open AccessH MaasARTICLEJournal of the History of…2022

    An abstract is not available for this content. As you have access to this content, full HTML content is provided on this page. A PDF of this content is also available in through the ‘Save PDF’ action button

  • Keith Tribe, Constructing Economic Science: The Invention of a Discipline 1850-1950

    Open AccessH MaasARTICLEOEconomia2022

    In Constructing Economic Science: The Invention of a Discipline 1850-1950 Keith Tribe takes us on a journey to show the transformation of economic discourse that turned a public discourse on things economic into a discipline with a separate curriculum and a technical vocabulary which was no longer accessible to the (literate) public at large. He does so not through the sequence of ideas of great economists, but by promising the reader a ‘Krimi’ t…

  • Introduction: Roads to Economic Knowledge: The Epistemic Virtues of Travel across the History of Thought

    Mauro Boianovsky, H MaasARTICLEHistory of Political Economy2022Cited by: 2References: 29

    In order to exam ine the his tor i cal rela tions between travel and eco nomic knowl edge, we, as edi tors of this spe cial issue, decided in 2019 to orga nize a con fer ence at the University of Lausanne to con trib ute to a grow ing lit er a ture in the his tory and phi los o phy of eco nom ics that exam ines the man i fold rela tions between econ o mists, their trav els, and the devel op ment of the eco nomic dis ci pline. 1 A mas ter course o…

  • Crossing the doorsteps for social reform: The social crusades of Florence Kelley and Ellen Richards

    Open AccessGabrielle Soudan, David Philippy et al.ARTICLEScience in Context2021Cited by: 1References: 5

    ArgumentThis paper contrasts the research strategies of two women reformers, Florence Kelley and Ellen Swallow Richards, which entailed different strategies of social reform. In the early 1890s, social activist Florence Kelley used the social survey as a weapon for legal reform of the working conditions of women and children in Chicago's sweatshop system. Kelley's case shows that her surveys were most effective as "grounded" knowledge, rooted in …

  • Politicizing the Environment

    H MaasARTICLEHistory of Political Economy2021Cited by: 1References: 22

    At the end of the 1950s, resource economists developed a method to derive demand functions for recreation sites from travel cost data for recreation planning purposes. Based on this work, a second, direct method of measurement was developed in the early sixties that became known as the contingent valuation method. Initially, this method asked respondents directly about their willingness to pay for a realistically described recreational amenity. W…

  • True Grid: Three Case Studies of Moral Accounting

    H MaasARTICLEEast Asian Science Technology and…2020

    This article examines and compares three grids that were designed to serve explicit moral accounting goals: the calculation and improvement of character. The examples are tables which fall under a broad definition of diagrams. The examples follow another in time, but it is not the article’s intention to suggest a historical lineage between them. Rather, it is the intention to clarify the interplay between grids and the precepts or keys to their u…

  • Thinking and Acting with Diagrams

    Open AccessHsiang-Ke Chao, H MaasARTICLEEast Asian Science Technology and…2020

    East Asian Science, Technology and Society: an International Journal - Volume 14, Number 2, June 2020

  • Monitoring the self: François-Marc-Louis Naville and his moral tables

    Open AccessH MaasARTICLEHistory of Science2020

    This paper examines the self-measurement and self-tracking practices of a turn-of-the-nineteenth-century Genevese pastor and pedagogical innovator, François-Marc-Louis Naville, who extensively used Benjamin Franklin's tools of moral calculation and a lesser known tool, Marc-Antoine Jullien's moral thermometer, to set a direction to his life and to monitor and improve his moral character. My contribution sheds light on how technologies of quantifi…

  • Introduction to Economics as a Public Science

    Open AccessH Maas, Steven G Medema et al.ARTICLEOEconomia2019Cited by: 2References: 4

    This short article introduces readers to the papers published in this issue on the theme of “public reason” in economics. It provides ground to the notion of “public reason” in economics as a two-way process taking place in interstitial spaces between economics, as an academic discipline, and the various publics in which economics—its concepts, tools, and methods— acquires meaning as an instrument of social understanding and political change

  • Introduction to Economics as a Public Science. Part II: Institutional Settings

    Open AccessH Maas, Steven G Medema et al.ARTICLEOEconomia2019References: 1

    This issue of Œconomia contains the second set of essays that emerged from the conference “Economics and Public Reason” hosted in May 2018 at the Centre Walras-Pareto for the History of Economic and Political Thought at the University of Lausanne

  • Craufurd Goodwin, Storyteller

    Tiago Mata, H MaasARTICLEHistory of Political Economy2019References: 5

    This essay reflects on the life and career of Craufurd Goodwin as told in his own words. Topics discussed include his decision to become a historian of economics, his descriptions of his research interests and what drew him to them, and his views on the discipline of the history of economics. Craufurd’s attitude toward his lived experience reveals degrees of investment and detachment analogous to his attitude toward the community of historians of…

  • Avner Offer and Gabriel Söderberg. The Nobel Factor: The Prize in Economics, Social Democracy, and the Market Turn

    Open AccessH MaasARTICLEThe American Historical Review2018

  • The Method of the Witness Seminar

    H MaasARTICLEHistory of Political Economy2018Cited by: 2References: 6

    On May 28–29, 2010, twelve experimental economists gathered at the Dutch Royal Academy of Arts and Sciences in Amsterdam for a witness seminar on the history of the experiment in economics. Though the witness seminar has been used as an oral method of research in contemporary history and in the history of medicine and technology, this was its first extensive use in the history of economics. My contribution examines the witness seminar as a method…

  • Transformative Friendships

    H MaasARTICLEHistory of Political Economy2018References: 5

    Review Article| December 01 2018 Transformative Friendships The Philosophical Breakfast Club: Four Remarkable Friends Who Transformed Science and Changed the World. By Snyder, Laura. New York: Broadway Books, 2011. 456 pp. $27.00.The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed the World. By Lewis, Michael. London: Penguin, 2017. 362 pp. $28.95. Harro Maas Harro Maas Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google History of Political Ec…

  • Introduction to the Symposium on the Contributions of Business to Economics

    Robert Van Horn, Edward Nik-Khah et al.ARTICLEHistory of Political Economy2017Cited by: 2References: 12

    This essay introduces the symposium and records some reflections from symposium participants on the role of businesses in the formation of economic ideas. What are some specific challenges in researching the contributions of businesspersons to economics? Which topics or events involving the role of businesspersons in economics are most in need of scholarly analysis? What are some of the key historical trends that can be discerned in how businessp…

  • A Road Not Taken: Economists, Historians of Science, and the Making of the Bowman Report

    Open AccessRoger E Backhouse, H MaasARTICLEIsis2017Cited by: 5References: 18

    This essay investigates a hitherto-unexamined collaboration between two of the founders of modern history of science, Henry Guerlac and I. Bernard Cohen, and two economists, Paul Samuelson and Rupert Maclaurin. The arena in which these two disciplines came together was the Bowman Committee, one of the committees that prepared material for Vannevar Bush’s Science—The Endless Frontier. The essay shows how their collaboration helped to shape the com…

  • Fraught with Controversy: Organizing Expertise against Contingent Valuation

    Open AccessH Maas, Andrej SvorenčíkARTICLEHistory of Political Economy2017Cited by: 4References: 17

    This paper examines consulting and expert work performed by (experimental) economists for the Exxon Valdez litigation case. One of the issues at stake was the use of a specific method, contingent valuation, to estimate the so-called passive use value part of the damage resulting from the Exxon Valdez oil spill of March 24, 1989. Our interest is less in the possibilities of using contingent valuation to estimate passive use values as such, and mor…

  • Letts Calculate: Moral Accounting in the Victorian Period

    H MaasARTICLEHistory of Political Economy2016Cited by: 3References: 26

    This essay examines the importance of an accounting culture for the rise of marginalism in Victorian England. I trace the use of accounting tools in family and private life to fend off uncertainties in the market and to enhance moral control of the self, examining the use of diaristic accounting for two Victorians, George Eliot and William Stanley Jevons, in more detail. The philosopher of mind Alexander Bain recommended the use of mercantile acc…

  • Marginalizing Maclaurin: The Attempt to Develop an Economics of Technological Progress at Mit, 1940-50

    Roger E Backhouse, H MaasARTICLEHistory of Political Economy2016Cited by: 3References: 21

    This article traces the attempts of W. Rupert Maclaurin to improve the research profile of economics at MIT through establishing a research project on the economics of innovation, funded by the Rockefeller Foundation. The project is important because it marks a significant stage in the transition of economics at MIT from being a department focused exclusively on providing courses for engineers and scientists to one that was to become a major loca…

  • Making Things Technical: Samuelson at MIT

    H MaasARTICLEHistory of Political Economy2014Cited by: 5References: 8

    This article examines how Samuelson defined his own role as an economist as a technical expert, who walked what he called the "middle of the road" to-seemingly-stay out of the realm of politics. As point of entry I discuss the highly tempting offers made by Theodore M. Schultz in the 1940s to come over to Chicago, which Schultz persistently repeated over three years and despite strong Chicago faculty resistance. A contrast between Schultz's own e…

  • Questions of Scale in Economic Laboratory Experiments

    H MaasARTICLERevue de philosophie économique2012Cited by: 1

    Les questions d’échelle ont donné lieu à une large réflexion s’agissant de la modélisation et de l’expérimentation des systèmes physiques, mais elles n’ont pas été discutées dans le cadre des expériences économiques. Dans cet article, on distingue deux sortes d’expériences, les expériences « génériques » et « spécifiques ». Développant une comparaison entre deux études expérimentales en laboratoire portant sur l’« effet des prix postés », on mont…

  • Observation and Observing in Economics

    H Maas, Michael S Morgan et al.ARTICLEHistory of Political Economy2012Cited by: 6References: 25

    Two themes are generative for revealing and understanding the history of observation in economics. First, we argue for the importance of noting that observation is an activity as well as a result, and second that observation is no more identical with quantification than observing is with measuring. These two themes enable us to discuss different historical dimensions of the ways in which economists have observed their economies and so enlarge our…