Terence Wilmot Hutchison FBA (August 13, 1912 – October
6, 2007) was a world-famous economist.
Born in Bournemouth,
England, the son of Robert Langton Douglas and Grace Hutchison (Grace
Hutchison, was not married to Douglas, and Terence chose her surname, he attended Peterhouse, Cambridge in 1931 to study the
classics but switched to economics. He took his bachelor of arts degree,
with first class honours, in 1934. Subsequently, he spent a year at the
London School of Economics (LSE), then became a lecturer in economics in
Bonn, Germany in 1935, due to an interest in Ludwig Wittgenstein. He
spent approximately three years in Bonn, learning the German language
while researching German studies in economics.
He married one of
his students, Loretta Hack (1910-1981), the daughter of Wilhelm Hack,
the socialist mayor of Traben Trarbach. The couple moved to Baghdad, where he took
a position at a teacher training college. Eventually, they moved to
Bombay. During World War II, he joined the British military, serving as
an intelligence officer on the Northwest Frontier, in Egypt, and then in
Delhi.
In 1946, he began his British university career with a
position at the University of Hull. After a year at Hull, he moved to
the LSE, where he became interested in the history of economics. The
University of Birmingham named him Mitsui Professor of Economics in
1956, holding that position he held until he retired in 1978. He
continued to teach the history of economics for another two years.
After retiring, Hutchison published the book Before Adam Smith in
1988, the first book in English to systematically analyze 18th Century
economic writing before the publication of Adam Smith's seminal work The
Wealth of Nations (1776).
His wife Loretta Hack, the daughter of the socialist mayor of Traben
Trarbach and was one of his students, died in 1981. In 1983,
he married Christine Donaldson, who died in 2003. He had three children,
two daughters and a son from his first marriage, who survived him.
Hutcheson's much-cited 1938 treatise The Significance and Basic
Postulates of Economic Theory established his credentials as an economic
methodologist.
Terence had a half-brothers, Marshal of the
Royal Air Force William
Sholto Douglas, 1st Baron Douglas of Kirtleside and full brother Donald Gabriel
Hutchison, later Donald Gabriel
Hutchison Douglas, a Spanish Civil War volunteer.
He died in
Winchester of heart failure on 5th October 2007.
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