Gerald Frank Shove (1887-1947)
Claudio Sardoni
Introduction
Gerald Frank Shove was born to Herbert Samuel Shove and Bertha Millen at Faversham in 1887. He died in 1947 in Cambridge. He was educated at Uppingham School and at King’s College in Cambridge, where he spent all of his academic life. A member of the society of Apostles, he was a close friend of Keynes and of most of the protagonists of the economic debates in Cambridge during the 1920s and 1930s. Shove’s influence on those debates is not well documented by his writings. He published very little and wanted his correspondence notes to be burnt after his death.1
Shove’s colleagues and friends in Cambridge did little to make his work better known outside their circle. Austin Robinson, 30 years after Shove’s death, devoted a few lines to him (Austin Robinson 1977: 28), and Richard Kahn wrote a short biography of Shove 10 years after that (Kahn 1987).[1] [2]
- 1 A few letters and some of his lecture notes have survived. See Harcourt and Araujo (1995) for a study of some of Shove’s surviving correspondence.
- 2 Austin Robinson limited himself to pointing out that Shove’s gifts were critical rather than creative and that his pacifist ideas were at odds with the younger generation’s positions in a ‘world that was war-mad’ (Austin Robinson 1977: 28). Kahn wrote: ‘At no time in his life was Shove a ready writer. Although he produced only a few answers in each paper, they were of...outstanding merit ... His fastidious selfcriticism explains why he rarely published his results and never wrote a book, but it was generally recognised that behind his greatness as a teacher lay originality as a dauntless thinker’ (Kahn 1987: 327).
In recalling the Cambridge intellectual atmosphere of the 1920s and 1930s, Kahn considered the importance of Shove’s contributions in three areas: the debate on increasing and decreasing returns, the related debate on imperfect competition, and the Keynesian revolution. For Kahn, Shove made his most significant contribution on the issue of returns, but he may have underrated Shove’s role in the debate on imperfect competition. Kaldor (1935: 34, fn. 3) described Shove’s work on imperfect competition as containing ‘one of the most penetrating analyses so far published on this whole subject’.
Kahn also held that Shove did not play any significant role in the Keynesian revolution. However, although there is no direct evidence that Shove played a direct role in the making of the Keynesian revolution, there is another aspect of the relationship between Shove and Keynes that is important. They both had a similar attitude towards the Marshallian inheritance. Shove, like Keynes, tried to retain the richness, complexity, and realism of Marshall’s approach, even though he was aware of the need to go beyond this inheritance.[3] Shove’s attitude towards Marshall led him, on several occasions, to clash with economists of the younger generation who, in order to achieve a higher degree of rigour and formal precision, were trying to develop Marshall’s economics by sacrificing those characteristics of Marshall that Keynes and he appreciated most.
Section 2 of this chapter examines Shove’s position in the debate on returns while Section 3 looks at Shove’s position in the debate on imperfect competition. Section 4 is concerned with the relationship between Shove and Keynes. Section 5 concludes.
- [1] C. Sardoni (h)
- [2] Professor of Economics, Sapienza University of Rome, Italye-mail: This email address is being protected from spam bots, you need Javascript enabled to view it © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017 541 R.A. Cord (ed.), The Palgrave Companion to Cambridge Economics, DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-41233-1_24
- [3] On Shove’s attitude towards Marshall, see Harcourt (1992).
