Donald Winch obituary

The market fundamentalism that has swept the Anglo-American world in recent decades likes to claim the 18th-century Scottish political economist Adam Smith as its intellectual godfather. But as Donald Winch, who has died aged 82, demonstrated, in his 1978 book Adam Smith’s Politics and in subsequent writings, this appropriation of Smith’s name misrepresents his purposes and his achievement.

As Winch showed, far from recommending unrestricted laissez-faire, Smith’s book The Wealth of Nations analysed the potentially damaging effects of market relations on civic virtue, emphasising the “mental mutilation” that factory labour can inflict, and even musing on the politically educative effects of a citizen militia. Smith was not endorsing an unrestrained individualism: rather, he was, along with figures such as his close friend and fellow philosopher David Hume, exploring the character of “commercial society” as part of a wider inquiry into the nature of law and government in modern states.

Winch’s account of Smith’s larger intellectual project was typical of the scrupulous scholarship that made him one of the world’s leading historians of political economy. Having been educated as an economist, Winch never lost his mastery of even the most technical aspects of economic theory. But he combined this with a subtle form of intellectual history that returned such theories to the thick texture of assumption and debate in which they were originally formed.

In this way, he reshaped our understanding of the part played by economic reasoning in British culture from the late 18th to the mid-20th century, along the way rescuing such figures as Smith, Thomas Malthus, Alfred Marshall and John Maynard Keynes from both their worshippers and their detractors.

Born in London, Donald was the only child of Sidney and Iris, who ran a greengrocer’s shop. From Sutton grammar school Donald went to the LSE, graduating with a first (1956). At Princeton, where he did his PhD (1960), he encountered Jacob Viner, one of the leading authorities on the history of economic thought. Winch’s first book, Classical Political Economy and Colonies (1965) already showed him beginning to question the present-minded version of history embedded in orthodox accounts of the development of economics.

After teaching for a year at the University of California, Berkeley (1959-60), he returned to the UK, first to a lectureship in economics at Edinburgh, and then in 1963 to the new University of Sussex. In 1969 he became professor of the history of economic thought, a post he held until his retirement in 2000. Winch possessed the energy and decisiveness, as well as public spirit, to take on administrative roles, as dean of the school of social sciences (1968-74) and as pro-vice-chancellor for arts (1986-89). His commitment to what he took to be the informing ideals of academic life together with his combative temperament meant he was not universally loved as a colleague, though no one could doubt the sincerity and selflessness with which he fought his many battles.

Winch’s early work focused on the intersection of the two topics named in the title of his second book, Economics and Policy (1969), which dealt with Keynesian-inspired policy-making in Britain and the US in the 1930s. But after the great success of Adam Smith’s Politics, he increasingly engaged with a wider range of themes in intellectual history. Common interests and a shared antipathy to the anachronistic, celebratory histories of scholarly disciplines led him to join forces with John Burrow and me to write That Noble Science of Politics: A Study in Nineteenth-Century Intellectual History (1983), with the result that for a while it became common to speak, with some exaggeration, of a “Sussex school of intellectual history”.

Riches and Poverty: An Intellectual History of Political Economy in Britain, 1750-1834, published in 1996, and Wealth and Life: Essays on the Intellectual History of Political Economy in Britain, 1848-1914, published in 2009, were linked volumes detailing the political and intellectual contexts in which various forms of economic theory were articulated and applied. Winch’s work is now the reference point for anyone with a serious interest in understanding the economic thought of these periods.

Though his published writing is measured and precise, Winch was a man of strong attachments and deep feelings, emotions sometimes masked from public view by a cultivated gruffness. As a friend he was wonderfully steadfast and unabashedly partisan, but also enormous fun.

He loved the magnificent park-like garden of his house in Sussex, which he developed with fine aesthetic sense and great practical skill. His responsiveness to nature expressed itself in surprising ways, including his perception that environmental concerns were central to John Stuart Mill’s social thought.

He was elected a fellow of the British Academy in 1986, and was a notably active publications secretary of the Royal Economic Society (1971-2016), overseeing the collected works of major economists as well as establishing an online database of economists’ archives.

His first marriage, to Marion Steed, ended in divorce. In 1983 he married Dolly (Doreen) Lidster, who survives him, together with his stepson, Nicholas.