Sandra J. Peart

Sandra J. Peart became the fourth dean of the Jepson School of Leadership Studies in 2007. 

A national leader in her field, she is a director of the annual Summer Institute for the Preservation of the History of Economic Thought at George Mason University. She is the 2007-08 president of the History of Economics Society.  

A distinguished scholar with special expertise in the history of economic thought and political economy, especially in the context of ethical leadership, Peart has focused her research in this area on two broad questions: First, how do individuals, who are motivated by private interests, come together to make decisions about the group? Second, how well do people make such decisions and are we all equally able to decide? For the purposes of economic analysis, Adam Smith argued that we are equally capable, with observed differences attributed to education and the division of labor. The "vanity of the philosopher" presupposes otherwise and such presuppositions lead to analytical failures. More

Peart has applied this insight to leadership, where she argues that one means by which to prevent ethical failures of leadership is to suppose that we are all equally capable of leading (or learning to lead). She then asks what this would mean institutionally and has argued in favor of trials of randomized leadership as an institutional framework that might yield “good” – ethical and effective – leadership. In collaboration with experimental economists at George Mason University, she has begun to investigate this question experimentally using a public goods game.

Dr. Peart is a regular presenter at the annual conference of the International Leadership Association and several years ago led the development of a leadership studies program at Baldwin-Wallace. In 2004-05, she was a visiting scholar at the Center for Public Choice at George Mason University.

Peart has received numerous awards and research grants. In 2005-06, she was a fellow of the American Council on Education. Peart has authored or edited five books and numerous publications. She co-authored or co-edited many with David M. Levy, a professor of economics at George Mason University. The collaborators are working on a new book, The Street Porter and the Philosopher: Essays on Egalitarian Economics (forthcoming, University of Michigan Press).

Before coming to the Jepson School, Peart was a professor of economics at Baldwin-Wallace College in Berea, Ohio, where she also served as chair of the faculty.
Previouslye faculty at Baldwin-Wallace College in 1991, Peart taught at the College of William and Mary.

News

• Her book named among the nation's best [article]
• Book review [article]
• Peart chosen as dean Dean [article]
• Thoughts about the Jepson School [interview]
   

Publications

Books

• John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor: Their (Friendship) Correspondence and Subsequent Marriage, and other papers by Hayek on Mill. Volume xxx of Collected Works of F. A Hayek (under contract). Gen. Ed. Bruce J. Caldwell. Forthcoming, University of Chicago Press, 2007.
• Sandra J. Peart & David M. Levy (Eds.). The Street Porter and the Philosopher: Conversations on Analytical Egalitarianism. University of Michigan Press, 2007.
• Sandra J. Peart & David M. Levy. The ‘Vanity of the Philosopher’: From Equality to Hierarchy in Postclassical Economics. University of Michigan Press, 2005.
• Sandra J. Peart & David M. Levy (Eds.). The Political Economy of Slavery. 4 vols. Thoemmes Continuum, 2004.
• William Stanley Jevons: Critical Responses. 4 vols. London: Routledge, 2003.
• Sandra J. Peart & Evelyn Forget, Eds. Reflections on the Classical Canon in Economics: Essays in Honor of Samuel Hollander. London: Routledge, 2001.
• The Economics of W.S. Jevons. Routledge, 1996.

Articles

• Sandra Peart & David Levy. “Charles Kingsley and the Theological Interpretation of Natural Selection.” Journal of Bioeconomics  8 (2006): 187-218.
• Sandra Peart & David Levy. “The Fragility of a Discipline when a Model has Monopoly Status.”  Review of Austrian Economics 19 (June 2006): 125-36.
• Sandra Peart and David Levy. “Inducing Greater Transparency: Towards the Establishment of Ethical Rules for Econometrics.” Eastern Journal of Economics (forthcoming).
• Sandra Peart & David Levy. “The Theory of Economic Policy in British Classical Political Economy: A Sympathetic Reading.” History of Political Economy 37 (2005): 120-42.
• Sandra Peart & David Levy. “Attitudes toward Race, Hierarchy and Transformation in the 19th Century.” History of Economic Thought 47 (December 2005): 15-31.
• Sandra Peart & David Levy. “Valuing (and Teaching) the Past.” Journal of Economic Education 36 (2005): 171-84.
• Sandra Peart & David Levy. “From Cardinal to Ordinal Utility Theory: Darwin and the Capacity for Pleasure.” American Journal of Economics and Sociology 64 (2005): 851-80.
• Sandra Peart, David Levy & Andrew Farrant. “When Socialism Fails, What Then?” European Journal of Political Economy 21 (2005): 1064-68; on ScienceDirect 2005.
• Sandra Peart, David Levy & Andrew Farrant. “The Spatial Politics of the Road to Serfdom.” European Journal of Political Economy 21 (2005): 982-99; on ScienceDirect 2005.
• “On the ‘Bitter Quarrel’ between Economics and Its Enemies.” History of Economic Ideas 12 (2004): 75-84.
• Sandra Peart & David Levy. “Sympathy and Its Discontents: ‘Greatest Happiness’ versus the ‘General Good.’” European Journal of the History of Economic Thought 11 (2004): 453-78.
• Sandra Peart & David Levy. “Analytical Egalitarianism, Anecdotal Evidence & Information Aggregation via Proverbial Wisdom.” Journal of Economic Methodology 11 (2004): 411-35.
• Sandra Peart & David Levy. “Sympathy and Approbation in Hume and Smith: A Solution to the Other Rational Species Problem.” Economics and Philosophy 20 (2004): 331-49.
• Sandra Peart & David Levy. “Statistical Prejudice: Eugenics and Immigration.” European Journal of Political Economy 20 (2004): 5-22.
• Sandra Peart & David Levy. “‘Not an Average Human Being’: How Economics Succumbed to Racial Accounts of Economic Man.” In David Colander, Robert Prasch & Faguni Sheth Race (Eds.), Economics and Liberalism. University of Michigan Press, 2004: 123-44.
• Sandra Peart & David Levy. “The Negro Science of Exchange: Classical Economics & Its Chicago Revival.” Race, Economics and Liberalism (2004): 56-87.
• Sandra Peart & David Levy. “‘Who Are the Canters?’ The Coalition of Evangelical-Economic Egalitarians.” History of Political Economy 35 (2003): 731-57.
• Sandra Peart & David Levy. “Post-Ricardian British Economics, 1830-1870.” In Warren Samuels, Jeffrey Biddle & John Davis (Eds.), The Blackwell Companion to the History of Economic Thought. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2003: 130-47.
• Sandra Peart & David Levy. “Denying Human Homogeneity: Eugenics & the Making of Post-Classical Economics.” Journal of the History of Economic Thought 25 (2003): 261-88.
• “Facts Carefully Marshalled in The Empirical Studies of William Stanley Jevons.” History of Political Economy Annual Supplement to Volume 33 (2003): 252-76.

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