Peter J. Dougherty


Peter J. Dougherty received his initial experience as an economics editor at McGraw Hill, and in 1985 became Basil Blackwell’s first American editorial director. He went on to do trade publishing at The Free Press until 1992, when he joined Princeton University Press, where he is now Publisher and Senior Economics Editor. Dougherty’s list of published authors includes some of the world’s most distinguished social scientists, among them over a half dozen Nobel prize-winners. He writes and lectures about social science publishing and about economic culture. His articles have appeared in the Financial Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Chronicle of Higher Education, The American Economic Review, The Journal of Scholarly Publishing, The American Sociologist, and elsewhere.




Papers Published in World Economics:


Speaking in Tongues

Over the past half century, a global economic language—a vernacular—has emerged. This vernacular, like any such language, has formed the foundation of much of contemporary economic culture across nations, and has facilitated communication on economics around the world. Two books have served as particularly rich sources of this economic vernacular, Paul Samuelson’s Economics (now with William Nordhaus), originally published in 1948, and Robert Heilbroner’s The Worldly Philosophers, first appearing in 1953. Peter J. Dougherty traces the history of these two modern classics and their influence—the former on scientific understanding, the latter on critical perspective—on the millions of students who passed through economic principles courses in the generations since the post-war publication of these books.

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