Gordon, Scott, 1924-....

H. Scott Gordon was a Canadian-American economist who served as an economics professor at Indiana University from 1966-1988 and as an associate professor in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science from 1983-1988.

H. Scott Gordon was a Canadian economist who taught at Indiana University from 1966 until 1988. In addition to his work at Indiana, Gordon helped found the economics department at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada, which he chaired from 1948 to 1966, and taught summer courses in the history of economic theory at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario from 1970 until 1996. In addition to his normal teaching load in the Indiana University Economics Department, Gordon also chaired the department from 1970 to 1973 and had a split appointment with the History and Philosophy of Science department from 1983 to 1988.

Gordon played a role in furthering economic scholarship by acting as a peer reviewer for several economics journals, including the Journal of Law and Economics. Gordon also served as President of both the Canadian Economics Association and the Western (U.S.) Economic Association in 1976 to 1977. Additionally, in 1960, Gordon played a significant role along with other Canadian economists in forcing the resignation of Bank of Canada Governor James Coyne.

Gordon was a fairly prolific author and wrote several significant articles and texts in the course of his career, the most notable of them being Welfare, Justice, and Freedom, The History and Philosophy of Social Science, and Controlling the State: Constitutionalism from Ancient Athens to Today. Gordon also wrote the very influential article The Economic Theory of a Common Property Resource; the Fishery in the Journal of Political Economy in 1954, which was extensively reprinted and eventually declared a citation classic . Gordon also received several awards and honors, including a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1965 and a Festschrift published in his honor in 1988.