Abstract
Gerschenkron was born in Odessa in 1904 and died in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1978. He left Russia in 1920 and settled in Austria. In 1938, a decade after receiving the degree of doctor rerum politicarum from the University of Vienna, he emigrated to the United States and spent the next six years at Berkeley. After a short period at the Federal Reserve Board, he went to Harvard in 1948 to teach both economic history and Soviet studies. His passion for the former dominated, and he flourished there as the doyen of economic history in the United States. He influenced a generation of Harvard economists through his required graduate course in economic history and attracted several to his seminar and the field. His erudition and breadth were legendary, and defined an indelible, if unattainable, standard of scholarship for his colleagues and students.
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Selected works
1943. Bread and Democracy in Germany. Berkeley: University of California Press.
1951. A Dollar Index of Soviet Machinery Output. Santa Monica: Rand Corporation.
1962. Economic Backwardness in Historical Perspective. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
1968. Continuity in History and Other Essays. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
1970. Europe in the Russian Mirror. London: Cambridge University Press.
1977. An Economic Spurt That Failed. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
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© 2008 Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited
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Fishlow, A. (2008). Gerschenkron, Alexander (1904–1978). In: Durlauf, S.N., Blume, L.E. (eds) The New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-58802-2_635
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-58802-2_635
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Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
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