Scholars

Born in Red Hill, PA, Senior Scholar John F. Henry earned an A.B. from Muhlenberg College in 1965, and studied economics as a graduate student at McGill University, earning an M.A. degree in 1967 and a Ph.D. in 1974. Spending most of his career as a professor of economics at California State University, Sacramento, he was also on the faculty in the University of Missouri–Kansas City’s (UMKC) Department of Economics for more than a decade. Henry joined the Levy Institute Graduate Programs in Economic Theory and Policy’s faculty during its inaugural year, offering his history of economic thought lectures to several cohorts of graduate students.

In 2016, Henry won the prestigious Veblen-Commons Award from the Association for Evolutionary Economics in recognition of his outstanding scholarly contributions to evolutionary institutional economics and a festschrift was published in his honor in 2015 (Jo and Lee eds., Routledge).

He was also a highly appreciated lecturer in the Institute’s Minsky Summer Seminar, where he annually opined on the relation between Veblen and Minsky. Former students will remember it as heavily influenced by his unique appreciation of Veblen, although much to the satisfaction of the organizers, his last presentation managed to include the institutional linkage to Minsky.

As the Levy expert in the history of economic and political thought, he was an avid collector of books on the subject, filling most of the basement of his house, which was shared by an impressive model train set that most visitors found more interesting than the books.

Alongside numerous journal articles, he is the author of two books: The Making of Neoclassical Economics (Unwin Hyman 1990; Routledge 2011) and John Bates Clark (Macmillan 1995).