Sometimes Luck Really Makes a Difference (On Mentors, and Senior Scholars)

Some senior scholars have an annoying tendency to pretend as if the new kids on the block simply do not exist. I found it hard to keep spirits up when I was struggling to find a permanent position and I was unsure about even belonging in the field; I found it shattering that people, whom I admired, and whom I knew had read (say because they had explicitly commented on) my work, refused not just to engage my material when dealing with the same subject, but couldn't even cite it in a passing footnote in their latest publication. There was also always a nagging suspicion that they were also the hostile referees that slowed down publication altogether. (I could go into a lot more infuriating detail, of course.) The sad thing is that such behavior is then emulated by others, more junior and the cycle continues.

There are alternative ways of being senior. In September 2001, after I returned from Las Vegas, where I had been stuck due to travel cancellations after 9/11, Warren Samuels -- a wonderful economist and a giant scholar on the history of economics -- forwarded me (without permission) some papers by Leonidas Montes, then a PhD student at Cambridge University (in economics, I think) with the suggestion to get in touch with Montes. Now even before we met, Warren had praised my research in a keynote he gave at a conference, and he became a wonderful encouraging mentor. At the time I was in the closing year of my PhD, which was on the reception of Newton by Hume and Smith. My research had taught me that my main thesis was ill-conceived, and I was struggling to make the material (including some stuff on Rousseau, modern Libertarianism, etc.) cohere. I had learned to listen to Warren's suggestions.