Larry Moss and the Struggle Against Racism by the Whately Professors of Political Economy

In this note, we highlight an important consideration of Larry Moss's life's work, the continual struggle within economics against racism. Larry initiated and supported the symposium on eugenics published by the American Journal of Economics and Sociology in July 2005. He edited the volume Social Inequality, Analytical Egalitarianism and the March Toward Eugenic Explanations in the Social Sciences in August 2008. These constitute obvious signs of Larry's concern.
He conjectured that the Trinity College Dublin political economists who held the Whately professorship should be thought of as a school. Such a school was in fact identified in 1850 by an outsider who pointed to their shared opposition to racial explanations within an institutional setting. That shared opposition allowed them to speak against the narrow interests of the rulers of the country. Of course, other political economists of the time, Mill in particular, were also emphatic in their anti-racism. Thus, not only do we need to take up Larry's challenge to describe the Trinity College school but we must also seek its connections with the Scottish-English group of anti-racists.