Comparing editorial problems: The Harrod papers and the Haberler correspondence on Prosperity and Depression

Daniele Besomi⊕

   Comparing editorial problems: The Harrod papers and the
    Haberler correspondence on Prosperity and Depression*

                        [Paper read before the conference on “Editing
                         economists papers”, Paris, 20–21 May 2006]

        This paper aims at illustrating the adaptation of standard editorial procedures to the
practical difficulties related to the preparation for print of two corpuses of documents: Roy
Harrod’s interwar papers and correspondence (Harrod 2003) and the documents relating
to the making of Gottfried Haberler’s Prosperity and Depression (1937).1
        In both cases, the editorial policy is guided by the praxis of scholarly textual
editing, according to which the editor’s primary task is that of making a corpus of texts
accessible and understandable to the reader by adopting the viewpoint of the author, as if
the reader were peering over the author’s shoulder and witnessing correspondence
flowing in and out and essays being written and presented to an audience. The corpus of
texts is expounded (seeking the most reasonable compromise between reproducing the
document as faithfully as possible and to avoid disturbing the flow of reading by retaining
obvious slips of the pen, typos and similar), and made understandable in terms of the
conceptual, analytical and methodological apparatus available to the author at the time of
writing. A scholarly edition therefore takes the form of an annotated, rather than
interpretative, edition.2 Yet the editorial rules do not admit of a mechanical interpretation,

⊕ Address for correspondence: dbesomi@bluewin.ch.
* I am grateful to the following people for permission to cite from unpublished writings: Helmut F.
Furth and to Peter Haberler for Gottfried Haberler’s writings, Christopher Johnson for Lionel Robbins’s
words, and Judith M. R. Brown for the citation by Dennis Robertson.
1 An edition of these documents is in preparation, edited by myself. Presently (July 2006) the collection
and transcription of documents are at an advanced stage, so that most problems related to the nature of the
materials are already apparent; specific editorial problems are naturally likely to arise at later stages of the
process.
2 Basic as they are, these principles do not always seem to be appreciated by readers and would-be-editors
alike. The Harrod edition was criticised for having failed to comment on Harrod’s texts in terms of the
secondary literature developed in the half a century following his writings (Young 2005; for a rejoinder
and a restatement of the editorial principles see Besomi 2006). On the editorial side, researchers are often
tempted to submitting for publication isolated archival findings, often nice and instructive but severed
from the corpus of documents to which they belong, thus failing to present the full context and making
successive scholarly editions more difficult; major journals seem to be keen to accept such pieces. (The
young myself was also guilty of such an approach when publishing Harrod 1996; the piece is now more
appropriatedly included in the Harrod edition, where cross references to and from the relevant
correspondence could be given. A comparison of the editorial apparatuses illustrates the point).
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and the specific nature of each set of documents raises different practical difficulties. The
materials relating to the cases examined here are to some extent contemporary to each
other (there is also some overlapping in the correspondence between Harrod and
Haberler), both contain correspondence, drafts and notes, but have different origin,
purpose and peculiarities, and were produced in different contexts, and therefore pose
different editorial problems requiring distinct solutions.

1. The context
         Harrod’s papers are the result of the normal activity of an Oxford don (without a
secretary) in the first two decades of his professional life, at a time when email did not
exist and phone calls were events to be agreed upon in advance.3 They include
correspondence (private, professional, political, administrative), lecture notes, reading
notes, drafts of papers (published and unpublished), proceedings of committees and of
research groups, cuttings from newspapers, offprints of Harrod’s own articles and of
writings by others, preliminary versions of his correspondents’ writings. Harrod was a
compulsory hoarder, and his collection includes almost any written piece of papers that
passed through his hands (including taylor’s bills and similar items).
         Correspondingly, the editorial project consisted in rendering these multi-faced
professional activities. The edition is centred around Harrod himself: the events are
presented as they would have been seen from Harrod’s own desk and the annotations
focuses more on Harrod that on his correspondents.
         The Haberler editorial project has a different scope. In 1934, Haberler was hired
by the League of Nations “to investigate the causes of economic depressions and later on
[…] to make recommendations as to how to prevent the economic system from collapsing
from time to time”4 (the second task was later dropped and postponed to a successive
phase of the League’s project). Haberler began by drafting a memorandum titled
“Systematic analysis of the theories of the business cycle”, where he attempted “to
gather various hypotheses of explanation and to compare them with the facts, with a view
to selecting those which seem most promising and, so far as possible, to combine them in
a later stage of this investigation, with a view to giving a rounded picture of the business
cycle”.5 The Memo was printed in August 1934 by the League and circulated in the
following months to about a hundred economists,6 practically a who’s who in business

3 Harrod’s letters preserve traces of such agreements: see for instance Harrod to Keynes, 26 October 1934,
in Harrod 2003, p. 315.
4 Haberler to R. Weidenhammer, 2 March 1934, carbon copy in League of Nations Archives,
10B/12809/12653 (Jacket 1).
5 G. Haberler, “Systematic analysis of the theories of the business cycle”, Geneva: League of Nations,
mimeo, 50 pages.
6 The first print totalled 150 copies, but in November 1934 100 more were reprinted due to the high
demand. A list of 65 names is cited by Trautwein and Boianovsky 2006, p. 49n, but more can be inferred
from the surviving correspondence.
                                                 - 2 -

cycle research,7 for comments and criticism. On the basis of their reactions, Haberler
revised and considerably extended his draft, and by June 1936 was able to produce a
three-hundred pages Enquiry into the causes of the recurrence of periods of economic
depression, part I being a “Systematic analysis of the theories of the business cycle” and
part II being a “Synthetic exposition of the nature and causes of the business cycle”. The
League (after some negotiation with the Rockefeller Foundation on the invitation list)
convened 14 economists8 to a 4-days meeting to discuss the outcome, and subsequently
Haberler finalised his work producing the volume Prosperity and Depression (1937),
which became a classic and in the following years underwent a number of partial revisions,
four further editions (1939, 1941, 1958, 1964), and translations in several languages.
Materials relating to these activities include Haberler’s memoranda, the correspondence
with other economists, notes and correspondence exchanged between the people involved
in the organization and the managing of the project (sometimes of an administrative
character, but also concerning the scope and method of the inquiry), verbatim records of
the discussions.9
        If Haberler was the leading theoretical figure in the League’s plan, the rôle of the
League itself —in particular in the person of the Director of the Economic and Financial
Section, Alexander Loveday— and of the Rockefeller Foundation, that financed the
project, have to be taken into account, for they channelled the purpose, the scope and the
procedure of the whole project. The edition of the materials relating to these activities,
therefore, is not going to be centred on the person of Gottfried Haberler, but on the
making of Prosperity and Depression.
        This raises a first editorial problem, that of defining the corpus of documents to be
edited by deciding whether and how to separate Haberler’s own professional
correspondence on other topics from that relating to the League’s project. This is not
always easy, for Haberler sometimes discussed several subjects at once and several
streams of correspondence occasionally joined together. Haberler’s correspondence with
Knight, for instance, dealt with the 1934 cycles memorandum but also with capital theory,
and the discussion was taken up, with explicit reference to this exchange, with others
correspondents as well (in particulat Machlup, Neisser and Hayek). The Harrod-Haberler
correspondence regarded both the Haberler memorandum and an article by Harrod on

7 The reason for the handful of important exceptions of which Haberler could not be thought to be
unaware, constitute an interesting puzzle. Two of these, Mitchell and Fisher, are cited by Trautwein and
Boianovsky, 2006, p. 49n. Others —Löwe, Kuznets and Pribram— are more intriguing.
8 Elevenn of whom eventually attended (along with Haberler, Loveday, and some officials of the League
and of the ILO): Oskar Anderson, J. M. Clark, Léon Dupriez, Alvin Hansen, Oskar Morgenstern, Bertil
Ohlin, Charles Rist, Lionel Robbins, Dennis Robertson, Wilhelm Röpke, and Jan Tinbergen. Bresciani-
Turroni declined for health reasons, Mitchell and Schumpeter in order to be able to work at their Business
Cycles volumes.
9 For an overview and evaluation of the procedure that led to Haberler’s book, including a survey of the
unpublised sources, see Boianovsky and Trautwein 2006.
                                                 - 3 -

credit policy, and a number of letters carry discussion of both these topics. While this did
not pose any problem of inclusion for the Harrod-centred edition, for the Haberler-League
edition it will be necessary to determine in each case whether the part of the
correspondence uniquely dealing with Harrod’s article is relevant to the making up of
Haberler’s mind as to his League book, or at ay rate for the understanding of the
remainder of the correspondence.

2. The repositories
        The Harrod papers were collected, and to a lage extent preliminarily sorted and
arranged, by Harrod himself.10 His impressive collection was dismembered at his death,
and sold (via a book dealer) in seven batches to five buyers in three continents; the family
still holds some materials, others have been handed to Harrod’s official biographer.
Harrod’s working library and what was found in his office is now in possession of
Nagoya University of Commerce and Business Administration in Nissin-Shi, Japan. The
main body of his professional correspondence is housed at another private University,
Chiba University of Commerce in Ichikawa, Japan. A smaller collection, mainly including
war-time materials and some professional correspondence, is at Tokyo University.
Harrod’s correspondence with Douglas Woodruff (mainly private in character) is at
Georgetown University in Washington, where the Woorduff papers are held. Finally, the
main body of Harrod’s private correspondence was sold in three separate batches to the
British Library in London.11
        This procedure makes the collecting and editing of the materials somehow
problematic. The copyright in Harrod’s words was sold together with the documents now
owned by the Japanese universities.12 These are free to give, or not to give, permission to
publish; although there were no problems with the printed edition, one of these institutions
decided not to grant permission to include their materials in the web-based electronic
version of the Harrod edition.13 There are also accessibility issues, due not to mere
geographical distance and dispersion, but to the rules of use of the main collection at

10 Harrod had prepared and labelled the documents for the benefit of ‘future historians of thought’, to
whom he left messages and comments (see in particular a note, dated 8 May 1945 and reproduced in
Harrod 2003, p. 1067, accompanying the documents certifying he had independently discovered the notion
of marginal revenue before the publication by Yntema in 1928, beginning: “This letter is of some interest
for the history of economic thought.”).
11 For a detailed description of these collections and an evlauation of their usefulness for an assessment
of Harrod’s contribution to economics see Besomi 2003.
12 Copyright problems distinguish the two editorial projects presented here from the others discussed at
the conference: while rights on ancient texts have expired, writings dating from the interwar years are
often still not in the public domain. Obtaining permission to proceed requires first to identify the holders
of rights for each and every writer cited (the writer if still alive, or his/her estate, which may be an
academic institution or one or more descendants or even some unrelated person), then to actually get in
touch with them and obtaining permission. Often one is faced with lack of replies, wich force repeated
requests until one can prove good faith. This can result in literally hundreds of letters and emails being
sent. Economists and journal editors alike do not seem to be fully aware of this procedure.
13 More on the electronic version in section 5 below.

                                                  - 4 -

CUC, which prevent scholars from accessing originals (although I was granted access in
motivated circumstances) and making photocopies,14 and the fact that the whole Nagoya
collection is now closed to researchers. Moreover, the catalogues of two of the Japanese
collections were prepared not by professional archivists, but by the bookseller who dealt
with the papers. In some cases, there seems to have been some fiddling with the original
arrangement prepared by Harrod himself. Finally, on a long-term perspective there may be
preservation problems, for last time I saw them some documents were kept in plastic
envelopes where molds thrived and where static charges detached ink from documents.
        The main bulk of the documents relating to the making of Prosperity and
Depression are preserved among Haberler’s papers, held at Hoover institution in Stanford
(most of which in a box, not yet listed in the archives’ finding aids, of unclassified
materials), and in the archives of the League of Nations in Geneva. Most of the incoming
correspondence was typed for reference by the League’s secretariat, so that fairly accurate
copies (sometimes multiple) are available in Geneva. Haberler kept the originals,
occasionally also a typescript, and carbon copies of his replies (when typed15 ); further
carbon copies are occasionally found in Loveday’s papers, and in the archives of
Haberler’s correspondents to whom they were sent back. The sets of correspondence
processed by the League seem to be fairly complete; Haberler, however, continued some
of the discussions in private, and therefore only retained the incoming correspondence. At
any rate, the editor should use as a copy text the original sent by Haberler, whenever
extant, in case there were last minute emendations or additions: this procedure (obviously
also followed when gathering the materials for the publication of the Harrod papers, which
eventually incorporated materials from almost seventy collections) requires to explore the
(potential) recipients’ archives.

3. Selection
The major selection problem relating to the Haberler documents has already been
mentioned in section 1 above. The volume of documents is of a maneageable size, so that
the only actual constraint lies in the interest of the documents to be included. While the
administrative part is rarely worth reproducing, the theoretical exchanges are all relevant.
The verbatim reports of the discussion on the last memorandum, however, require further

14 This occasionally created difficulties in transcribing particularly convoluted handwritten materials, for
the impossibility of photocopying documents prevented showing them to colleagues for advice.The rules
for the use of the Harrod Papers are posted at http://www.lib.cuc.ac.jp/english/rules.html.
15 Not all his correspondence was typed by the League’s secretariat: frequently Haberler wrote his letters
himself by hand (and had the bad habit of not dating letters). Richard Kahn malignantly noted: “I have
noticed from some time that he has been writing me letters in his own handwriting. Surely Rockefeller
has provided him with an adequate staff of typists. I have a feeling that he is rather anxious to regard our
correspondence with him as of a private nature, so that it need not appear in the files of the Secretariat
where, to his embarrassment, any enquirer might be able to read it” (letter to Harrod, 25 November 1934,
in Harrod 2003, p. 354).
                                                  - 5 -

thought, for the quality of the transcriptions was harshly criticised by at least two of the
participants.16 It is, at any rate, necessary to develop a strategy to deal with the omissions.
        The procedure devised for the Harrod edition may be applicable in its broad
outline to the Haberler project. Harrod was a prolific writer, and hoarded several
thousands letters in his lifetime. A first decision regarded the period of interest: a natural
starting point is the first part of Harrod’s professional life, which began at the end of the
first World War, while an equally natural closing boundary is the outbreak of WW2. The
interval includes the beginning and consolidation of Harrod’s academic career and
reputation, an era during which Harrod produced an extraordinary number of theoretical
tools and notions at a rate unequalled in the following years; it also coincides with two
decades of unique theorethical inventiveness in economics, echoes of which are abundant
in Harrod’s papers and correspondence. What remained was however still overabundant.
Most of the private correspondence (about 3,000 letters in the inter-war years only),
although fascinating would be of scarce interest to the intended readership, consisting of
economists presumably more interested in what was going on in Harrod’s ‘mental
laboratory’ under the continuous stimulation of his correspondents’ inputs. Accordingly,
materials were selected for inclusion precisely in so far as they provide insight into
Harrod’s career as an economist, his contributions to this subject, his philosophical
interests, his political passion and activities, and the debates in which he was engaged. A
further distinction, between materials of utmost and of partial interest, led to inclusion in
full of the first kind of materials and to an abstract in the form of diary entry, possibly
quoting some relevant passages, for those of limited significance only.
        Such a choice is surely subjective, and is bound to leave out materials of potential
relevance to other researchers, such as biographers or sociologists inquirying into the
social relationships among Oxford dons (analogously, the purely administrative materials
related to the Haberler and League project would be informative for researchers
investigating the working of such an institution). It is therefore necessary to supply the
reader with information on the location, and possibly also on the content in broad lines, of
the omitted materials. In the Harrod edition, a special section is dedicated to a listing of
such omissions; something similar will have to be considered for the Haberler edition.

4. Specific problems/peculiarities

16 Haberler described them as “not very well done” (letter to Morgenstern, Carbon copy in League of
Nations Archives file 10B/21852/12653); Robbins commented that “the transcription was really most
inaccurate—in many cases making one say exactly the opposite of what one intended to say& what one
must actually have said if ones colleague did not then and there call ones whole statement in question” and
added that he “often had to correct my own interjections completely unable to make rhyme or reason of
the statements I was supposed to be [illegible word] & I imagine mine is not an isolated experience”
(undated letter to Haberler, stamped as received on 17 September 1936, League of Nations Archives file
10B/21852/12653). Robertson found “some of my own remarks so unintelligible that I cannot correct
them, & suggest that in these cases they might be omitted!” (letter to the League of Nations (perhaps
Felkin), 13 October 1936, League of Nations Archives file 10B/21852/12653).
                                                  - 6 -

While Harrod’s papers and correspondence are entirely in English, an outstanding
feature of the Haberler materials is the presence of documents in several languages. The
official languages of the League were English and French, but Haberler also corresponded
in German with colleagues sharing his mother tongue. Occasionally, ther are also
incoming letters in Italian, which were however translated into French by the League
secretariat. This poses the problem of how to deal with these materials, a consistent
fraction of the corpus. It is certainly opportune to retain the original language, but English
readers (and especially English language publishers) will want materials in English. The
difficulties in translating inhomogeneous materials, written by various authors using
different terminologies (in exchanges often dealing precisely with terminological issues)
and having different theoretical backgrounds, suggest that the original is supplemented by
an extensive and detailed summary in English, and that the original terminology is indexed
separatedly.
         Another issue that may concern the Haberler project, while practically inexistent in
the Harrod case, regards variants of texts. Harrod almost never introduced relevant
changes to his articles, the only two exceptions in the interwar years being the essay where
the marginal revenue concept was expounded (the first version was submitted to the
Economic Journal in 1928, rejected for reasons connected to another part of the argument,
and rewritten with a complete shift of emphasis in 1930), and the famous 1939 “Essay in
dynamic theory” (more than half of hich was rewritten due to Keynes’s criticism in
1938). The alterations being so drastic, a variorum edition would not have made sense; the
drafts are therefore included in the edition as independent essays (the critical apparatus
does, however, point at the correspondence on the subject and at the corresponding
alterations introduced later). As to Haberler, the drafts of the his memoranda do not seem
to be extant. The second memorandum, however, deserves to be compared to the published
version, at least in terms of a collation table.17 This, however, is a decision that will be
taken at a more advanced stage in the editing process.
         Some minor differences may be expected between the Haberler and Harrod
projects in the decisions regarding the process of standardization of the text. To avoid
disturbing the flow of reading, some standard elements in the text are made uniform
troughout. Mathematical expressions, in particular, are reproduced in modern notation,
using for instance the symbol “≥” instead of a barred “

the same passages, when Harrod’s letters to Haberler are reproduced, for a typo by the
editor. On the other hand, Haberler’s sometimes uncertain English (especially in the first
year after his arrival in Geneva) is probably to be retained.
         Other editorial solutions adopted in the Harrod papers seem to be transposable to
the Haberler project: the system of cross references permitting to follow one specific
exchange within the strictly chronological order of reproduction of documents, for
instance, solved a problem that also appears in the Haberler correspondence. The
distinction of three kinds of notes (one, printed at the bottom of the page and indicated by
a roman numeral, reproduce the author’s own or the recipient’s comments in the margin; a
second one, printed at the end of each document and indicated by an arabic numeral, refers
to the editorial apparatus; and a third one, printed after the editorial notes and indicated by
a lettered apex, is reserved to annotations regarding the source —reporting typos etc., and
the repository details18 ) also responds to a need arising in the Haberler as well as in the
Harrod editions.

5. Electronic edition
        In spite of the making all editorial decisions explicit and of all efforts not to intrude
on the text, some interference is unavoidable. The editor’s decision of what is interesting
and what should be omitted is to some extent subjective, not only so far as the general
problem of drawing of the line is concerned but also because the actual judgement on each
specific document depends on the editor’s understanding of the issues at stake. The
editorial interference is even more explicit in the process of conceptualization unavoidably
implied by the construction of the subject index.
        A traditional paper edition can limit the damage of the selection process by
indicating where the materials can be located and by giving some information about their
content and nature, but can hardly avoid the second problem. In the Harrod edition, the
indexing problem was that of finding some common denominator through time, covering
two decades during which a large number of topics was discussed and, for certain issues,
the terminology, the analytical instruments, and the very theoretical concepts underwent
dramatic changes. For the Haberler edition, the problem is somehow the reverse: in a short
time-span, a limited number of topics was tackled but with a variety of approaches, terms
and concepts (and, in some cases, the issue at stake was precisely the definition of terms:
an aspect on which Haberler insisted with particular emphasis, as one of his points was
that apparent conceptual differences between the position of various authors could be
boiled down to terminological peculiarities while the substance of the arguments was not
too dissimilar). Whatever solutions will be found, they are bound to reflect the editor’s

18 Although, strictly speaking, the two latter kinds of notes both belong to the editorial apparatus, the
lettered one are likely to be of scarce interest to the intended readership of economists. If readers are
prepared to trust the editor, they are facilitated in recognizing the notes to be disregarded.
                                                 - 8 -

understanding of the business cycle problem and of the debates in those years, and
therefore to leave some readers discontented.
         An antidote to this dissatisfactory state of things can be supplied by
complementing the traditional printed edition with an electronic one. A pioneering attempt
was done with the Harrod edition: the largest fraction of the transcriptions (with the
corresponding editorial apparatus) is freely available online at
http://economia.unipv.it/harrod/edition, through the generosity of most copyright
holders19 and the far-sighted appreciation of the publisher, Edward Elgar, who agreed to
let me post free online the entire three-volumes set a couple of months after publication in
print. Posting cost-free on the web enables to complement the printed version with
additional transcriptions and with reproductions of documents as pdf-scans, and permits
electronic searches of the text. This enables one to overcome the problem of the
interference with the index the only limitation now being the author’s usage of words. The
two tools are naturally best used in conjunction with each other, so that the electronic
edition is best thought as a complement, rather than an alternative, to the printed edition.20
It offers the additional advantage that it can easily be updated or corrected, if new finding
or the identification of errors requires doing so.
         Readers seem to have appreciated, judging from the high number of visits most
pages (i.e., individual letters or essays) have been receiving since the site’s publication in
September 2003 (an average of 7 to 9 hundred hits per page, with a record of 8,800 hits
for Harrod’s correspondence with Alfred Ayer, totalling over 5.2% of the entire traffic of
the server of the Faculty of Economics of the University of Pavia where the site is hosted).
In the long run, the publisher did not feel damaged, and has already granted permission to
proceed in the same way with the Haberler collection (copyright holders are again being
equally generous).

6. Normalizing oddities
        A scholarly edition is a long and painful process. The excitement of discovery,
however, and the feeling of being able to find and place the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle
(often a multi-level one) and seeing eventually the overall picture emerge from one’s work
rewards for the shortage of other publications prevented by the long time absorbed in the
search for the small details (such as an obscure reference, or the evidence that some
document is not extant or that, on the contrary, it is available in other repositories with
thrifling emendations) for the composition of two-lines footnotes that scarcely anyone will

19 Only a handful of bodies did not grant permission to proceed, the most regrettable omissions being
Harrod’s own writings in possession of Chiba University of Commerce. While this does not much affect
the correspondence (Harrod’s incoming mail is subject to rights of the authors of the letters or their
estate), it takes its toll on the essays.
20 Limiting oneself to electronic publishing would be a very dangerous choice: standards, both in the
hardware and in the software, are changing so rapidly that there is no guarantee that the product is readable
after a decade. Printed materials are instead capable of resisting centuries, if preserved properly.
                                                   - 9 -

ever read but must be written anyway. To the feeling of satisfaction also contributes the
solution of the specific problems accompanying from the outset every editorial enterprise:
the success of which is measured by the lack of perception that there even was a problem.

References
Besomi, D.
2003      “The Papers of Roy Harrod”, History of Economics Review 37, Winter, pp.
          19–40.
2006      “A note on Textual editing: A Rejoinder to Young”, forthcoming in Journal of
          the History of Economic Though, September.
Boianovsky, M., and Trautwein, H.-M.
2006      “Haberler, the League of Nations, and the Quest for Consensus in Business
          Cycle Theory in the 1930s”, History of Political Economy 38:1, Spring, pp.
          45–89.
Haberler, G. von
1937      Prosperity and Depression. A Theoretical Analysis of Cyclical Movements,
          Geneva: League of Nations.
Harrod, R. F.
1930      “Notes on Supply”, Economic Journal XL, June, pp. 233–41.
1996      “An Essay in Dynamic Theory (1938 Daft)”, edited by D. Besomi, History of
          Political Economy 28:2, pp. 253–80.
2003      The Interwar Papers and Correspondence of Roy Harrod, edited by Daniele
          Besomi: Cheltenham: Elgar.
Young, W.
2005      “[Review of] D. Besomi (ed.), The Collected Interwar Papers and
          Correspondence of Roy Harrod”, Journal of the History of Economic Thought,
          27: 4, December, pp. 459-62.

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