Speech by G. L. S. Shackle at the Conference Dinner of the George Shackle Conference

Today I have felt extremely humble and intensely proud. The only way in which I can account to myself for this wonderful event, this gift which you have given me, is to suppose that it is just one more item in a long series of enormous pieces of luck. My whole life has been a long chain of pieces of luck. I have had the immense good fortune of spending two and a quarter years at the LSE at a time which I feel, and I think that other people agree with this view, was the real apotheosis of the school, when it was a sea of intellectual excitement and when the spirit in the place was marvellous and indescribable. Everybody who met anybody else in the passage was discussing some theoretical or scholarly idea, and the seminars, of course, were just, I might say, a maelstrom of ideas. They were not always rigidly systematic, because everybody wanted to talk — some people wanted to talk all the time — but they were utterly stimulating beyond expression. I used to attend the Hayek seminars which took place at 7.00 p.m. on Thursday evenings. Now you might think that that was not a very promising time of day because, after all, students who meant business had spent their whole day attending lectures or writing essays or reading books in the library and you would expect them to be tired. But, as a matter of fact, I think that late hour had its own advantages.