I teach economics at a liberal arts college and manage to do a little research
on the side. Right now I'd like to gather any references you may have to Tory
economics.
I should explain.
The kind of Tories I'm asking about aren't the neo-liberal kind of conservative
who today have largely taken over the right. I'm talking about the "one nation"
Tories--Hodge and His Masters?--who perhaps survive in the UK even if they're
rare in the US. Some strains of US communitarianism come close, but these
usually claim to be egalitarian (and hence not Tory in the sense I'm using the
term, which I think involves "knowing one's place"), or else these US
communitarians are frankly authoritarian (which ignores the other aspect of Tory
thought, that of "noblesse oblige").
"Knowing one's place" *and* "noblesse oblige": have economists ever had this as
one possible institutional context for their models? How about in the past (and
I'd be interested no matter how far back you go, asking only that the slant be
an *economic* one)?
Private replies are fine, but it may also be that they belong on the list. After
all, some have found this kind of Tory thought quite similar to one way of
looking at socialism. The issue has, of course, been raised again by Blair's
leadership of the UK Labour Party. (Alan Freeman's post about the Liberal Party,
by the way, gave me the idea of bringing this whole issue to PEN-L.)
So, "knowing one's place" (the whole business of adaptive preferences?) *and*
"noblesse oblige", all from an economic perspective: references, please....
p.s. I'm exploring, not necessarily espousing, this perspective.
p.p.s. Many thanks indeed.
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