As a Colleague
After another year at Harvard (1986-1987), Charles took an appointment as Reader in Social and Economic History at Oxford, and Fellow of Nuffield College. In 1989, he was elected to the Chichele Chair of Economic History, at All Souls College, which he occupied for 10 years.
Charles participated in the CLARE Group of economists who agonized over economic decline in the late 1970s (Matthews and Sargent 1983).[1] He understood from the outset that expectations and emotions had an effect on the work effort:[2] ‘The root of the problem in the British economy was to do with labour relations and a combination of attitudes on the part of the workforce that were detrimental to productivity, reinforced by employers’ refusal to recognize what would have been necessary to overcome those attitudes’, he told Mark Thomas (Thomas 2002: 294). These class-rooted attitudes were also ‘an extremely powerful factor in Britain’s early post-1945 problems’. He made some headway on a history of the British economy in the post-war years, but the book was not finished. In conversation (and at his lectures), it struck me how strongly he felt about these dilemmas, and what he saw as the mindless unreason of the unions. He actively supported the Social Democratic Party (SDP) when it broke away from Labour in 1981, but he moved no further to the right. When Margaret Thatcher announced her resignation in 1990, ‘Charles was fairly jigging around the room with delight’ (St. John n.d.).
Charles was my colleague for more than two decades, first at York and then at Oxford. In conversations over the years, he surprised me several times with a robust endorsement of an acquisitive and self-interested human nature. He had a taste for hard-nosed self-regarding theories of motivation, whether Marxist or neoclassical (like his mentor Maurice Dobb, who expounded both versions at Cambridge). But (again like Dobb), his own personal practice belied these beliefs.
