Warren Joseph Samuels was born in 1933 in New York City. In 1954 he graduated from the University of Miami, where he had he majored in economics, political science, and accounting, and minored in philosophy, revealing early on the breadth of interests and competence that would mark his later career. Warren was admitted to a number of top graduate programs in economics and chose to attend the University of Wisconsin, where he was taught economics in the institutionalist tradition that had been developed there by John R. Commons and his students. He completed his Ph.D. in 1957 under the direction of Edwin Witte. After serving on the faculties of several universities, Warren joined the Michigan State economics department in 1968, and remained on the faculty until his retirement in 2001.
Warren was a humble, gentle, and generous person. He was also a great and prolific scholar, at one time the most published author on the MSU faculty. Warren worked in the history of economic thought, but viewed it as a branch of intellectual history: not “What did Adam Smith think?” but “How did Adam Smith’s ideas, and the reactions of others to them, reflect and contribute to the development of the western intellectual tradition?” Warren also made important contributions to the literature on economic methodology. He angered or annoyed some economists with this work, because in seeking a richer understanding of the philosophical and methodological underpinnings of various approaches to economics, past and present, he had no qualms about pointing out the ways that those underpinnings could hamper or mislead inquiry. But he had no axe to grind. He was just calling it as he saw it, and his arguments were compelling to those willing to listen with an open mind. In other research, Warren explored questions related to the joint development through history of legal and economic institutions. He worked with the fundamental assumption that economic and political power is often used to influence legal rules and institutions, which in turn affect the performance of economic institutions, often, but not always, in a way that reinforces the existing distribution of power and wealth. Warren’s goal was a positive analysis of this process in historical time, and its role in driving economic and political change as well as the content of economic and political thought. And in all these areas, Warren contributed insights and ideas that were deep and influential.
Warren was driven by an intense, insatiable intellectual curiosity. As much time as he devoted to his own research, he knew he could never explore all the questions that piqued that curiosity, and so took up with enthusiasm the task of editing collections of essays devoted to topics that interested him, recruiting other scholars to help expand his and our understanding of those questions—serving, for example, as the editor or co-editor of forty volumes. His many interests led him to be an active member of a number of scholarly societies, several of which awarded him their highest honors at some point in his career. Economists like George Stigler, Paul Samuelson, and James Buchanan, whose interests at one time or another overlapped with Warren’s, engaged his ideas in formal or informal settings, and regarded him as an intellectual peer.
Warren supervised the dissertations of many Ph.D. students who later went on to successful academic careers, and he is remembered in the scholarly communities in which he was involved for his incredible kindness and generosity to young scholars: responding to their requests for comments on their work, providing publication opportunities for them in the numerous volumes that he edited, and generally encouraging them in their intellectual pursuits. Warren’s contributions to the encouragement of young scholars continues through the activities of the Warren J. and Sylvia J. Samuels Young Scholars program of the History of Economics Society, a program endowed by Warren and Sylvia to support and highlight research in the history of economic thought by Ph.D. candidates and scholars who have recently obtained their Ph.D.s.