I have known a relatively small number of truly brilliant people. . . . I have enormous respect for them. Only one of them, however, elicits awe. That is Stanley Todd Lowry.
—Warren Samuels, on the presentation of S. Todd Lowry as Distinguished Fellow of the History of Economics Society, 2001
S. Todd Lowry quietly passed away April 10, 2023, at his home in Lexington, Virginia, after a brief illness. He was ninety-five.
Todd was the esteemed Book Review Editor of HOPE for much of its early days—from 1974 to 1999—a quarter of a century. He was also a member of the HOPE Advisory Board for many years, as well as a member of the Editorial Board of Research in the History of Economic Thought and Methodology for decades.
Todd was a kind, gentle, humble, brilliant man—although an intimidating scholar—intimidating because he knew so much, was so broadly read, and read so deeply. He was largely concerned with the foundations of economic ideas, and where these ideas have traversed from these foundations, and where they possibly could have gone (since economic thought and activities are human activities and are thus subject to human choice—as emphasized by, among others, Aristotle).
Todd is especially known for his profound knowledge of the ancient Greek economy and its thought, elaborated most fully in his major work, The Archaeology of Economic Ideas: The Classical Greek Tradition (1987a), but also for many articles and reviews written in the years before and after that work. Todd took on much of the academic establishment, particularly in the various international classics departments, who generally held that there was either a paucity of, or else absolutely no, economic thought in the ancient societies. For them (as well as many others in the various academic fields concerned in one way or another with the history of economic thought), economic theory could only occur and develop in, and be about, markets and a market exchange economy—or, in its Marxist variant, only in a capitalist society. For Lowry, these were unduly narrow, restrictive definitions and conceptions of the subject. Lowry's largely institutional view posited that economics is (or should be) the study of efficient administrative management. The ancient classical Greeks fully developed this branch of knowledge, which they called oikonomia and which has generally been translated into English as “the royal art,” “household management,” or “estate management,” although it might also be “translated as ‘the patriarchal art’ or the ‘leadership art’ according to the context” (1987a: 79). This body of knowledge covered such diverse activities as the management of private estates, the city and body politic, and other organizations such as the military, and it eventually developed into two distinct strands, or streams, or crucial historical traditions: a sort of applied, how-to, “masters of business administration” approach, which can be traced back to Plato's contemporary, Xenophon; and a more theoretical, “liberal arts” approach that largely began (or may be uncovered, found) in the great seminal works of the Western intellectual tradition of Plato and Aristotle (and many of the Sophists as well).
With his institutionalist view of economics and its history, economic theory then is largely a branch of social theory, and it developed in, among other places, works of law and theology and thus in various law codes (both secular and religious), as well as in the enormous and varied political theory and advice to princes literature; it was also developed somewhat independently by merchants and other economic actors, and it may also be uncovered in myths and in poems and songs of ancient (and not so ancient) bards. Hence, Lowry's corpus casts an extremely wide net, seeking to capture the multifarious influences and sources of the history of economic thought. Moreover, he frequently offered creative solutions to problems and issues that arose in its understanding and in interpreting its development, including the proper nomenclature and categorization of these multiple strands of development. He thus linked not only ancient Greek economic thought but also medieval, Renaissance, and early modern thought to contemporary economic theory. All this was accomplished by someone who was legally blind, one eye having been destroyed from a childhood gun accident in (or near) the storied frontier town of Laredo, Texas.
Stanley Todd Lowry was born on June 26, 1927, the second of five children, in the then small city of Laredo, on the Rio Grande (population thirty-three thousand). His parents, Willis Edwards Lowry Jr. and Ruby South Lowry, were medical doctors. When Todd was ten years old, his father died, a victim of a flu epidemic. His mother took over the medical practice and raised the five young children on her own.
At the young age of fifteen, Todd graduated from Martin High School in Laredo in 1942. After leaving town, led by his seeing-eye dog, for the state capital, Todd received his BA degree from the University of Texas at Austin three years later—age eighteen. The degree was in a special liberal arts program modeled after Robert Hutchins's “Great Books Program” at the University of Chicago and St. John's College, Annapolis, Maryland. This undergraduate education gave him the background and lifelong appreciation of the importance of studying the great books in the Western tradition (and later the appreciation of the importance of the great books of non-Western civilizations: e.g., Persian, Indian, Chinese, etc.).
Todd went on to law school, receiving his LLB from the University of Texas Law School in 1951. Although Todd refrained from becoming a professional lawyer, this formal training gave him the background for understanding and appreciating the importance of legal theory and practice in the formation of economic theory and practice—a key part of his oeuvre. Examples include his article on Lord Mansfield (1973), “Bargain and Contract Theory in Law and Economics” (1976), and “The Economic and Jurisprudential Ideas of the Ancient Greeks: Our Heritage from Hellenic Thought” (1998a).
After taking several years off from academia, and working at a variety of marginal jobs, developing what Todd called “street wisdom,” and also some training as a baker, Todd went back to university, this time to study geography and natural resources—more evidence of his unusually wide-ranging interests. He received his MA degree from Louisiana State University (LSU) in 1956 with a thesis titled “Henry Hardtner: Pioneer in Southern Forestry.” Hardtner (1870–1935), a Louisiana businessman and early conservationist, was considered the “father of forestry in the South”; this thesis reflected and stimulated Lowry's lifelong interest in the importance of natural resources, particularly forests, and the need for their careful managed harvesting and production administered by human agents. One of Todd's last articles was a detailed study of the agricultural practices and agricultural manuals used in seventeenth-century England (2003). Moreover, he was not only a scholar but a practitioner who, despite his impaired vision, planted trees and managed orchards with different varieties of nuts on his Virginia homestead.
Todd received his PhD in economics from LSU two years later. His fields were history of economic thought, natural resources, transportation, physical and cultural geography, and forest economics. His dissertation, “A Survey of Early Economic Thought on the Problem of Resource Analysis,” was on ancient Greek resource policy. A thoroughly modest man who was not above making fun of himself, he somewhat humorously wrote in the preface to his major work that he had “a rather exploratory Ph.D. dissertation accomplished without the benefit of any prejudicial supervision in this area” (1987a: xiii; emphasis added).
A BA degree with an emphasis on the Great Books tradition; a law degree; a master's degree in geography and natural resources; a PhD dissertation on a particular administrative concern of ancient Greek thought: these, along with his steely determination to overcome early difficulties and his disability, set the stage for his mature thought.
After receiving his PhD, Todd spent a year as Assistant Professor at East Carolina University, in Greenville, North Carolina. He moved the next academic year, 1959–60, to the small, private liberal arts college Washington and Lee, one of the oldest institutions of higher learning in the nation, in the small town of Lexington, Virginia, in the beautiful Shenandoah Valley. Except for occasional sabbaticals and visiting teaching positions at places such as the University of North Carolina, Duke University, and the University of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, Todd remained at Washington and Lee for the next thirty-five years.
In working out his vision of the history of economic thought as part of a long tradition of efficient administrative management theory, perhaps the key conflict or dialectic that concerned Lowry was the relationship (or struggle) between more top-down administrative control and more bottom-up participative management. The former approach was typified by Plato in his Republic, with his absolutist, moral perspective supposedly discovered by pure reason. In opposition, the Sophist Protagoras held that “man is the measure of all things”; and the Sophists generally held that social consensus should be arrived at through a more democratic public participative process. This latter approach also involves a more relativistic appraisal of law and appropriate societal rules, mores, and regulations, where different societies or organizations may have different rules appropriate to their particularity. Aristotle, the great ancient systematizer, attempted to work out a synthesis between these two poles. Thus, a crucial issue for Lowry is who does the administrating, how do the administrators (or “experts”) make their decisions, and who controls these administrators and how. He notes that “this tension between regulation by a democratic assembly and trust in the commitment to the public interest of self-appointed experts has a distinctly modern ring” (1987b: 16). By Todd's reading of our discipline's history, it is only in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that a type of economic naturalism developed, an “ideological influence . . . in which the market mechanism is viewed as the only ‘natural’ regulator of economic transactions. . . . The emerging market came to be seen as the new ‘administrator’ of the economy and, in economic theory, clothed with all the rational attributes formerly thought to reside only in the human mind” (1987a: 249). Over time, this misleading, overly restrictive view came to obscure the older administrative tradition—which may still be the case today. For Lowry, the market is something to be managed and administered—not worshipped as some force of nature.
In 1988 Todd initiated and then circulated a newsletter and exchange, The Invisible College of Researchers in Ancient, Medieval, and Renaissance History of Economic Thought, sent to all scholars he could locate working in the field. Although the Invisible College included no more than a score or two of scholars, Todd conceived of the field broadly, including “jurisprudential, political and moral correlations” to economic thought, and he sent the newsletter to scholars who were “in various disciplines such as the classics, economics, history, philosophy, law and political science” (1988). The newsletter contained the names, addresses, and titles of recent publications as well as working papers of these relatively few, often quite isolated scholars toiling in this vast domain. Todd kept up the newsletter until 1995. In this current century, it is perhaps difficult to realize how valuable this resource was in the largely preinternet world that we then inhabited.
Todd was the seventeenth President of the History of Economics Society in the 1990–91 academic year. He was named Distinguished Fellow of the Society a decade later in 2001.
Todd always considered, as an essential element of his responsibilities, collecting and collating scattered, often rare, obscure bibliographical sources; then pointing out their important significance and generally guiding other scholars in the field onto avenues for fruitful future research. His self-assigned role as a guide to others working in the dimly lit fields of pre-Smithian economic thought manifested itself in all his writings. In one issue of his Invisible College newsletters, he commented on the importance and “special interest in the commercial and legal terms that have evolved over the years” and the “pidgin language” or “lingua franca” or “sabir” that “developed and persisted for seven centuries in the Mediterranean” and what French and Spanish sources to study them in (1991). In another he noted the need to “look at metaphor in past thought as a source of systematic expositions of economic theory” and the crucial exemplar of Policraticus or The Statesman's Book by John of Salisbury published in 1159 AD in its “systematic use of anatomical or organic metaphor—the human body—as a symbol of the commonwealth”—the peasantry being “the feet,” the circulation of money being “the blood,” and so on (1995a). He used his book reviews to illuminate the importance of various works and topics that might otherwise be underappreciated or escape our attention—such as the development of bills of exchange in medieval and early modern Europe (1996b, 1998b), medieval Islamic thought (1995b, 1996a), and the entire mirror for princes literature (e.g., 1990).
His particular bête noire was the almost complete neglect of harmonic proportions by contemporary classical and medieval scholars—who have little background in economic or legal theory—in their myriad attempts to understand Aristotle's theory of exchange in book 5 (“Justice”) of the Nicomachean Ethics. Unfortunately, “the existence of the third or harmonic proportion, crucial to an understanding of Aristotle's analysis of exchange, has not been appreciated by many translators and commentators” (1987a: 184). For Lowry, “the harmonic proportion is thus a technique for framing the difference between extremes and a mean from the subjective point of view of each extreme” (305n10) and is hence “the zone of surplus created by parties coming together to exchange” (305n11). He calls for “a careful retranslation and analysis of the manuscripts from which our Aristotelian material is taken by one cognizant of this background” (209) and asks, “Has the harmonic proportion been brushed aside because it is mathematically challenging?” (1999: 197). Lowry had to repeat this criticism in his very last publication in the book series Advances in Mathematical Economics (2010: 193–97).
Todd could not have accomplished all this without the enduring support of his wife, Faye Cole Lowry (1928–2018). Faye assisted Todd in various capacities in his teaching and research (editor, reader, typist), traveling to conferences and workshops, and particularly the important “major independent role she played in the bibliographic research that contributed to the correlation of much scattered secondary literature” (1987a: xii).
Todd, like many of his generation who helped found our leading contemporary history of economic thought journals and societies, believed that the history of economic thought should be part of the training and character formation of all professional economists—and not as a mere handy “tool of the trade”—but to fundamentally help guide what can and ought to be done in contemporary economic theory and policy advice.
Warren Samuels, in his review in this journal of Lowry's major work, wrote that “the book is a brilliant exercise of the intellect by one of the finest intellects and brilliant historians of thought in the discipline” (1989: 160). He concluded that “Lowry's book is a tour de force and is recommended to any economist seeking to appreciate the larger dimensions of the discipline and to all historians of economic thought” (160). Samuels's recommendation, written decades ago, still holds true today—probably even more so.1
I thank Todd's daughter Lynn Lowry Leech for her help and insight.