Abstract
The career of Timothy Aloysius Smiddy (1875–1962) spanned the first three decades of Irish independence. Smiddy in 1897 abandoned study for the priesthood in order to study economics at Cologne (p. 22). He subsequently enjoyed a long, varied and influential career employed in academia (for fifteen years) followed by over two decades within public service. Furthermore, this academic and public service career was bookended by a working life within business (including a chairmanship of the Arklow Pottery board). As late as 1956 he was undertaking a business trip to the Netherlands (p. 152). His participation in the Fiscal Inquiry Commission in 1923, Tariff Commission (1930–33) and advisory role to De Valera (1932–45) are all examined in this volume. The strongest aspects of Envoy Extraordinary are the way it sets out Smiddy’s career. It is particularly informative and valuable in this regard. The picture Sagarra likewise produces of the way public and private institutions operated is enlightening if not always flattering.
Sagarra contends that Smiddy is an important figure in the economic history of the Free State because of his contribution to policy in the areas of tariffs and trade, central banking and agriculture as well as his long-standing advocacy of technical and professional education (p. 102). Social philosophy, Catholicism, democracy and Irish nationalism are in Sagarra’s view the ‘four discrete strands’ within Smiddy’s thinking (p. 35). This reviewer suspects that this is not the whole story. The balance between these influences ebbed and flowed over time. Moreover, while his rejection of radical economic nationalism (p. 41) is certainly explanatory partly in terms of his pragmatism, so too I would argue were other intellectual influences at play. Pragmatism after all, as Malcom Rutherford has demonstrated, was interconnected with American institutionalist approaches to economics.
Smiddy’s early (1916) definition of economics was that it was ‘the mental discipline which studies the activities men employ in getting their living’ (p. 30). Hence his definition followed Marshall’s observation that economics was concerned with the ‘ordinary business of life’. Sagarra is correct that Smiddy’s academic publications were few in number (p. 7), and she observes that he was far from the obvious candidate as the first professor of economics at UCC (pp. 28–9). However, we might be more charitable in our evaluation; Smiddy was at the time far from unique in being a professor within an Irish university with few publications, and he developed some intellectual reputation within the international economics profession subsequent to his tenure at UCC.
While not a prolific publisher by modern standards, Smiddy was far from unknown within the wider profession. Sagarra underestimates in my view the influence of American economic thinking on Smiddy’s intellectual development. Irving Fisher at Yale was, for instance, an influential admirer of Smiddy’s thinking regarding banking and currency. Fisher’s endorsement was important, as he was prior to the Wall Street Crash the world’s premier monetary economist. During Smiddy’s diplomatic role as minister plenipotentiary (1924–9), he gave economic lectures at a range of the then leading departments such as Harvard, Michigan, Missouri and Northwestern (p. 70), as well as Columbia (p. 117).
American economics until the 1940s was significantly less neoclassical and more institutionalist than was the case in Britain. This approach to economics was unarguably more committed to realism than Marshallian approaches; it was also less predicated on free market solutions. As Malcom Rutherford has observed, outside of Wisconsin, Columbia University was the leading centre for the study of institutionalist alternatives to neoclassicism between the wars. Smiddy’s connection to Columbia’s Henry Parker-Willis is particularly important in this light. Furthermore, though Smiddy was an instinctive free trader (pp. 102–3), he was pragmatic enough to modify this view in light of a changing political environment (p. 8). We can speculate that Smiddy’s outlook on the world evolved. Over time it probably owed more to work experience, pragmatism and American institutionalism than any early attachment to Marshall.
Sagarra notes that Smiddy’s German educational background helped develop vocational education at UCC, but she does not comment on the fact that his early German academic training may have also influenced Smiddy’s subsequent intellectual evolution. The Germanic influence within Smiddy’s outlook may partly explain the ease with which he was able develop an academic profile within the United States; it may also partly explain why he took the policy positions he did.
Intellectual biography is underdeveloped within Envoy Extraordinary. This reviewer was, for instance, interested in why while Smiddy was an informed student of Catholic social teaching, he distanced himself simultaneously from the position of the Church (p. 103). Sagarra doesn’t provide a significant discussion on this important topic; nor does she note the more general point that Irish academic economists, unlike in some other European countries, managed for the most part to maintain a relatively ‘safe’ distance from clerical control. Smiddy’s argument that conservative banking practices perpetuated the existence of uncompetitive industries – an insight taken from his 1936 lecture to the Statistical and Social Inquiry Society of Ireland (p. 109) – also remains underdeveloped in terms of its implications for interpreting Irish economic history.
Even when Smiddy considered ‘non-economic’ topics, his economistic perspective still shined through. For instance, in Smiddy’s 1925 essay entitled ‘The Possibility of Disarmament’, he argued that limitations on armaments in the ‘Old World’ would rapidly produce ‘economic and social results’ that would encourage further disarmament (p. 68). It is noteworthy that Smiddy’s ‘peace dividend’ argument – based as it is on what we would now recognise as cumulative causation analysis – rested on non-Marshallian foundations. Moreover, it is also an argument that has much more recently exercised defence economists.
A final weakness of the book is arguably more ‘stylistic’ than substantive. The tenor of the discussion could be better expressed at points. For example, the mention of ‘unproductive citizens’ (p. 98) as a barrier to economic development does not fully convey the issues at hand. However, while there are important weaknesses within Envoy Extraordinary, Eda Sagarra has nevertheless on balance produced an informative and valuable biography which has much to offer students as a supplementary reading to undergraduate and postgraduate courses in Irish diplomatic, intellectual and economic history.