The Evolution of the Allied Social Science Associations |
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| Authors: | Betsy Jane Clary |
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| Institution: | 1. At the College of Charleston;2. Betsy Jane Clary is Professor of Economics and Director of the Honors Program in the School of Business and Economics at the College of Charleston. Her primary teaching interests are the history of economic thought and financial institutions and markets. Her current research interests include the relationship between ethics and economics, religious socialism in Germany in the 1920s, relationships between individual freedom and order in society, and financial market instability. She has published in the Review of Social Economy and the Forum for Social Economics, among other journals, and she has published numerous book chapters. She is a past president of the Southwestern Social Science Association, a past vice‐president of the History of Economics Society, program secretary of the Association for Social Economics, vice‐president of the Association for Social Economics, and she serves on the editorial board of the Review of Social Economy. The author wishes to thank John Siegfried, Secretary/Treasurer, American Economic Association, for permission to use the documents contained in the Archives and the staff of the Perkins Library, Special Collections Department, Duke University, for their assistance in using these Archives. |
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| Abstract: | The organization of the meetings of the approximately 50 economics associations of the Allied Social Science Associations has evolved over the past 140 years, beginning with meetings of the American Social Science Association in 1865, which included social scientists from political science, history, sociology, and economics. Out of this association, the separate disciplines formed their own organizations beginning in the 1880s. Though several of these associations continued to meet together until the 1930s, each discipline gradually separated its meetings from those of the others. During the 1940s, however, other newly formed economics associations began meeting at the same time and place as the AEA, and the Allied Social Science Associations evolved out of these meetings. Though the name of the organization includes “social science,” the associations meeting together are predominately, if not completely, economics associations. These associations, however, profess many different approaches to the study of economics. This paper traces the evolution of these meetings and attempts to come to some conclusions concerning the significance of this association, the most important of which is the role of the ASSA in providing a broad and tolerant platform and a vehicle through which different points of view toward economic theory and policy can be discussed. |
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