Keith Tribe

Independent Scholar

Keith Tribe was born in 1949 in London and studied at the University of Essex between
1968 and 1971, graduating in sociology and then was a Gastarbeiter in West Berlin and
Fürth during 1971–72. He did his graduate work from 1972 to 1975 at the University of
Cambridge and in 1978 published Land, Labour and Economic Discourse. From 1976, he
worked at Keele University, taking early retirement as Reader in Economics in 2002. He was
a Humboldt Stipendiat at the Universität Heidelberg (1979–80) and Visiting Fellow at the Max-
Planck-Institut für Geschichte, Göttingen (1982–85). During this period, he began translating
the work of Reinhart Koselleck and Wilhelm Hennis and after his retirement from Keele
established his own translation company, Klartext. From 2002 to 2013, he worked part-time as
a rowing coach at King’s School, Worcester; he currently teaches the History of Economic
Thought at the University of Birmingham with Roger Backhouse.

He has published Governing Economy: The Reformation of German Economic Discourse,
1750-1840 (1988); Strategies of Economic Order: German Economic Discourse, 1750-1950
(1995, 2007); and Economic Careers: Economics and Economists in Britain, 1930–1970
(1997) and edited (with Hiroshi Mizuta) A Critical Bibliography of Adam Smith (2002). In
2015, he published The Economy of the Word: Language, History, and Economics and in 2016
a new translation of Schiller’s On the Aesthetic Education of Man and The Contradictions of
Capital in the Twenty-First Century: The Piketty Opportunity (jointly edited with Pat Hudson).
He is currently completing a new translation of Max Weber, Economy and Society, Part I. While
at SCAS, he will be writing up work that he has done over many years on the development of
economics as a university discipline from the 1850s to the 1950s.

This information is accurate as of the academic year 2017-18.