A Twentieth-Century Eclectic: Richard Goodwin

Richard Goodwin is a remarkable person. He has had three professional careers: first, at Harvard (which included a spell as a lecturer in physics during the Second World War); second, at Cambridge, England, where he taught for thirty years and was a Fellow (and wine steward) of Peterhouse, Girdlers’ Lecturer and ultimately a Reader of the University; and now a splendid metamorphosis at Siena as Professor of Economics Emeritus (for the first four years of his retirement from Cambridge he was Professor at Siena, the first non-Italian to hold such a post). He lives in Siena during the Italian academical year; for the rest of the year he lives with his wife Jacquie in a thatched cottage in that part of the countryside where Cambridgeshire starts to have hills. There, he works on economic theory. His mind is as fertile now as in any part of his working life and the strands of thought that he has developed over the years have come together in a grand synthesis, his own vision of the nature of the development of the capitalist economy. This has been included in his lectures in Siena, which are given jointly with Lionello Punzo. These lectures both complement and significantly add to his ideas in his two volumes of collected essays (Goodwin, 1982; 1983). His vision continues to inspire the work of his research students and younger colleagues at Siena and elsewhere.1