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Placing Donald Winch in Context: An Essay on Wealth and Life Winch, Donald. Wealth and Life: Essays on the Intellectual History of Political Economy, 1848-1914. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2009. Pp xi + 419. ISBN 9-7805-2171-5393 (Pb). £18.99.
That understanding a past author or work presupposes attention to his intellectual context is now an orthodoxy of intellectual history and needs no labouring. J.W. Burrow [1981] 1983. A Liberal Descent. Victorian Historians and the English Past. Cambridge University Press, p. 5.
1 Introduction
Donald Winch is one of the leading historians of ideas of the last half century and hence, given the Australian tradition of not deferring to individuals of high standing, it is incumbent upon me to treat both him and his most recent publication, Wealth and Life, roughly. He is an Englishman to boot. Unfortunately this critical, if not disrespectful, Antipodean approach is a slightly taxing line to adopt in this particular case due to the fact that Wealth and Life is, in many ways but not in all ways, a valuable intellectual product. Indeed, unlike many young scholars who are now forced (or choose?) to dissipate their research energies by publishing in volume on nothing in particular to meet annual ERA or RQF quotas, Winch, the slow-moving elder statesman of the discipline, has made a contribution to the literature. It was also made manifestly clear to me from my first sweep through Wealth and Life that Winch is sufficiently integrated into the machinery that produces the publications in the discipline of intellectual history - that is, the mentoring, the examining, the refereeing, the reviewing, the questions from the conference floor, and so on - for him to be best placed to introduce, with the majestic engine-master's wave, the latest literature that is worth considering on a subject in this discipline. Thus, and with much qualification of this point later, one gathers the same amount of intelligence on 'who is doing what' in the discipline of intellectual history in the time that it takes to read the book under review as one does from several years of unwanted corridor conversations or tedious conference attendance. Still, though these outstanding qualities make my strategy of faultfinding challenging, there are faults to find and I will...