Harvard’s Society of Fellows
In the middle of Samuelson’s second year at Harvard, Wilson had written to Lawrence Henderson, describing Samuelson as “One of the most brilliant young men in political economy whom I have ever met,” recommending him for appointment as a Junior Fellow in Harvard’s Society of Fellows.1 The Society of Fellows was the creation of Lawrence Lowell, just after he stepped down as president of Harvard, and Lawrence Henderson, professor of biological chemistry who had become head of the Fatigue Laboratory in the Graduate School of Business Administration and had developed a strong interest in sociology.
They shared the view that PhD training was stifling the creativity of talented young scholars, who would flourish if, instead of undertaking formal training, they were given the freedom and the resources to pursue independent research. Graduate schools, Lowell believed, had “developed into a mass production of mediocrity.”2The Society of Fellows was the solution that they, together with Alfred North Whitehead, professor of philosophy, came up with. There was to be a group of around twenty-four junior fellows, each of whom would be appointed for three years, with the possibility of renewal for at most one further term; they would have few obligations other than to meet for dinner on Monday evenings and for lunch on Fridays. A condition of their appointment was that they were not allowed to register for a higher degree. These arrangements reflected a belief that creativity could best be nurtured in an environment in which young scholars engaged in dialogue with people from many disciplines. It was intended that, whether they remained at Harvard or moved elsewhere, having being elected to such distinguished company would make it unnecessary for junior fellows to have the union card of a PhD.a As mentors, they had nine senior fellows who joined them for dinner on Mondays.
Of these, as much by force of personality as by any formal position, Henderson was the dominant influence. One of his associates wrote of him:Henderson’s beard was red but his politics were vigorously conservative. His method in discussion is feebly imitated by the pile-driver. His passion was hottest when his logic was coldest. Yet if he felt a man had something in him, no one could be more patient than he in helping it come to light. He had the gift of taking a scholar’s raw data, no matter how far they might be from his own field of biochemistry, and bringing out the pattern that lay in them.3
Though he had not yet (formally, at least) taught him economics— Samuelson had taken only his mathematical statistics course—Wilson believed Samuelson to be suitable for appointment as a junior fellow, telling Henderson: “I think he has had enough course instruction. I think he is a self-starter and might do an extraordinarily good job if he had the opportunities that would come with being chosen as a Junior Fellow.”4 Questions had presumably been raised concerning both his personality and, Wilson presumed, his being Jewish, but he argued that neither should be a barrier to his appointment.5
Some people say Samuelson will be hard to place because of certain [doubts] about his personality and because I suppose he is Semitic. My own personal contacts with him lead me to believe that he is not objectionably Semitic. I personally think that his personality defects are of the sort often found in aggressive clear-thinking self-directing young men and that they auger well for a productive life. I don’t believe they are so bad as to make it difficult to place him and I do believe that three years as a Junior Fellow might of a great deal to ameliorate such defects as he has.6
In using the phrase “not objectionably Semitic,” Wilson was alluding to the distinction that was sometimes drawn between the cultured and wealthy
a.
The Society was modeled on the Trinity College Prize Fellowships at Cambridge, with which Whitehead was familiar, and the Fondation Thiers, in Paris, which Henderson had visited in 1913.Jews, such as the Rothschilds, who had long been established in the United States and were welcome at Harvard, and the more recent influx of Eastern European Jews, who were less welcome.[26] Their long conversations after class must have reassured Wilson that, despite his Eastern European origins, Samuelson would fit well into the cultured conversations that lay at the heart of Henderson’s Society of Fellows. Such “personality defects” as Samuelson had were common in precisely the sort of bright young men Henderson was trying to recruit for the Society of Fellows. Wilson must have known that his view would carry weight with Henderson, for they knew each other well, with Wilson participating in Henderson’s interdisciplinary sociology course.b
Wilson’s support for Samuelson’s becoming a junior fellow was echoed by Schumpeter, who described him as “the most gifted graduate we have had these many years,” capable of discussing matters with all his professors on “the footing of perfect intellectual equality.”[27] He had passed his generals “with the utmost ease” and had two “highly original” papers that were about to be published. Writing to the mathematician George Birkhoff, then a senior fellow, as well as to Henderson, Schumpeter then tackled the issue of Samuelson’s mathematics, arguing that this provided a reason why the Society of Fellows should take him.
He has the additional claim that, owing to the mathematical turn of his mind, he will not be very acceptable to the common run of economists and that, unless he gets that fellowship, he will be forced to deviate from the path he has cut out for himself and to accept injurious compromise.[28]
He was too mathematical to be acceptable to most economists and so needed the opportunity that a junior fellowship would give him.c Schumpeter then turned to the objection that, although the Society of Fellows included brilliant mathematicians, Samuelson’s mathematics would not be attractive to them, either: “The Society I know is not very favorably disposed to economists and to theoretical economists of the mathematical type least of all.” He countered this by arguing that even if Birkhoff and Henderson were skeptical about mathematical economics, this should be a reason to help “gifted young men who devote their energies to the thorny task of making an exact science of economics.”
Samuelson’s application was accepted, and in the autumn of 1937, he joined the Society of Fellows. As a junior fellow, free of all responsibilities other than to pursue his research and to attend the weekly dinners, he was completely happy.
It was, he wrote, lucky that no one offered him a permanent fellowship, for he would have accepted it.10 It was a period, coinciding with that in which economists took up Keynes’s General Theory, that he repeatedly described using lines from Wordsworth’s The Prelude, “Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive / But to be young was very heaven!”11 Writing in the third person, he reflected on this period:Before his SSRC fellowship gave out, he overcame the opposition of the Society of Fellows to economics and rode on the shoulders of Vilfredo Pareto into the sacred circle of Junior Fellows. The philosopher Willard van Orman Quine, the mathematician Garrett Birkhoff [son of George Birkhoff], the double-Nobel physicist John Bardeen, the chemists Bright Wilson and Robert Woodward, the polymath Harry T Levin were his companions in arms in the Society of Fellows.12
Other junior fellows with whom he had close contact included the mathematicians Lynn Loomis and Stanislaw Ulam, physicist Ivan Getting, historian of science Henry Guerlac, and historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr.d In this environment, Samuelson wrote, “he hit his stride and began to turn out articles faster than the journals could absorb such quasi-mathematical stuff.”13 During his three years as a junior fellow, he published thirteen articles covering fields as diverse as consumer theory, production theory, the rate of interest, international trade, and business cycle theory; his confidence showed in reviews that dismissed the books in a few lines of criticism.14
Samuelson’s appointment to the Society of Fellows, in September 1937, placed him at the heart of a community in which attempts were being made to establish new foundations for the human sciences. The central figure was Henderson who, in addition to his role in setting up the Society of Fellows, was involved in other elements in what historian Joel Isaac (2012, p. 60) has called “the interstitial academy,” or “the Harvard complex,” a network of institutions firmly rooted in Harvard’s traditions but standing apart
d.
Note that Bright Wilson, Garrett Birkhoff, and Willard Quine had ceased to be junior fellows in 1936, though they probably attended dinners, as former junior fellows were entitled to do. He remained in contact with all three. from conventional departments.15 The first of these was a seminar, Pareto and the Methods of Social Investigation, which began in 1932 and included Schumpeter among its members. In his biochemical research, Henderson had applied Willard Gibbs's ideas about chemical equilibrium to biochemistry and human biology. This work prompted Henderson to engage with a cluster of philosophical problems relating to scientific inquiry.16 He invested heavily in the concepts of system and organization, recognizing that such manmade symbolic frameworks could be important elements of science, for without them the collection and interpretation of facts would not be possible.During the 1920s Henderson's interest in scientific reasoning developed, and in 1926, he encountered the work of Pareto. What attracted him to Pareto was that he offered a set of concepts—nonlogical motivations that manifested themselves either as core values (“residues”) or as verbal rationalizations (“derivations”)—that could function as the concepts of temperature, pressure, and concentration functioned in chemical systems. Pareto's sociology offered a way to describe social phenomena in such a way that they could be analyzed as “dynamical, thermodynamical, physiological, and economic systems.”17
The Society of Fellows was, along with his course Concrete Sociology (Soc. 23) and his work in the Fatigue Laboratory, the instrument through which he propagated his ideas. Several of Samuelson's contemporaries in the society had either worked with Henderson or were working in accordance with his views on organic systems (George Homans, Conrad Arensberg, William Whyte, James Miller). Charles Curtis and Crane Brinton, close associates of Henderson, were appointed senior fellows.
Samuelson has stated that he rejected the ideas of this group, which came to be known as the Pareto Circle.My relation to the Pareto-Henderson-Homans-Curtis coterie at the Society of Fellows can be simply put. These turned out to be purely social. I went but once to the famous Henderson sociology seminar. That was either once too many or many too few. When I would want to talk about Gibbs to Henderson, he would prefer to enumerate the shortcomings of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. In 1937 it was a case of Henderson's being too old or Samuelson's being too young, or both. My guarded admiration for Pareto the economist has been great; but during the vogue for his sociology, I stayed out to lunch.18
However, though he might “stay out for lunch” as regards Paretian sociology, there remained the compulsory Monday evening dinners; he could ignore the Pareto seminar, but this did not mean he could ignore Henderson or his views on science. As has been noted, Henderson was forceful in putting forward his views and dominated the society—to the extent of choosing the wine served at dinner, being proud of the cellar comprising good French Burgundies and Alsatian wines he had collected, and crucially, setting the topics for conversation over dinner. He held forth on Pareto and scientific method, and circulated his lecture notes for Sociology 23 to all the junior fellows. “Henderson’s preoccupations,” it has been claimed, “were all but impossible for Junior Fellows to ignore.”19 When Samuelson came to leave Harvard, he wrote to Wilson that he had learned a great deal from conversations with people like Lowell, Whitehead, and Henderson.20 Notwithstanding his rejection of Paretian sociology and the demands of politeness in writing to a friend of Henderson’s, there is no reason not to take this remark at face value.e