Charles Hilliard Feinstein (1932-2004)
Avner Offer
Introduction
Charles Feinstein’s achievement was to work out the structure and size of the British economy from 1965 and back to mid-Victorian times. This makes it possible to evaluate how well the economy has performed at any point in the past 150 years, and to compare it with other periods and other countries. There is a great deal more: a precocious apprenticeship, an extension of knowledge in related fields and further back in time, inspiring teaching, effective administration, and professional leadership. As a scholar, Feinstein was a master of both structure and detail. As a colleague, he combined authority with integrity and generosity. Beyond scholarship, his life also subsumed a longer arc: the quest for an equitable South Africa in his youth, and its resumption in his final years.
A life is formed by its times. Charles was the eldest child of Rose and Louis Feinstein, members of the liberal Jewish community of Johannesburg. Louis had immigrated as a child with moneyless parents from Latvia and rose to become a prosperous stockbroker. In politics, he was an ‘armchair Marxist’, and current issues were discussed critically at home. Charles excelled
1 This chapter is derived from Offer (2008) with the permission of the British Academy. [1]
at Parktown Boys’ High School (modelled on English grammar schools) and graduated before he was sixteen. At Witwatersrand University, he studied economics, although with some regrets at not having chosen history. His best teachers left their mark: Helen Suzman in economic history, later renowned as the only anti-apartheid MP, and Ludwig Lachmann in economics, a refugee from Austria, and unusually for the time, a disciple of Hayek and an ‘Austrian’ economist of the top rank. After taking his degree in 1950, and at the insistence of his father, Charles qualified as a chartered accountant in 1954. It was ‘the most boring period of his entire life’.[2] But he was good at accounting, and it left a mark. He also took a further (‘honours’) course in economics, and appreciated the discipline of dissecting difficult texts with the critical Lachmann.
Charles was determined to change the world as well as to understand it: He joined the Communist Party, the most racially inclusive opponent of apartheid. At the age of twenty-one, he chaired the youth wing of the Congress of Democrats, a small group of whites supporting the African National Congress. Selling the party sheet is a rite of radicalism. His friend Bob Hepple remembers how
Charles insisted that we had to ‘connect with the Black masses,’ and this led us to the bus queues every Friday night. The queues were notorious for muggings and stabbings, and you can imagine the astonishment of the waiting black passengers to see young whites ducking and weaving among them apparently impervious to these dangers and to the risk of arrest. Charles’s innocent smile would soon melt any hostility (Hepple 2005: 1).
The economics that appealed to him were those of Karl Marx, and he submitted an honours dissertation on the labour theory of value. The external examiner W.H. Hutt, an early member of the Mont Pelerin Society and a ferocious critic of trade unions, rejected the thesis outright. Despite achieving a First Class in the exams, Charles failed his degree. He had applied for graduate work in Cambridge, and reported this setback anxiously. The left-wing economist Piero Sraffa generously deferred a decision on admissions until Charles could get there in person. When the day to leave arrived, hundreds of black youths came to chant their farewells at the railway station—his period of active struggle was over.
- [1] A. Offer (и) Chichele Professor Emeritus of Economic History and Fellow of All Souls College, University of Oxford, UK e-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 R.A. Cord (ed.), The Palgrave Companion to Cambridge Economics, DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-41233-1_46
- [2] From the transcript of the address at Charles’s funeral, composed jointly by members of his family, andread by Alan Stein.
