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Edward Mason

Edward Mason, in addition to his notable contributions to the science of government, served as chairman of the Sloan Commission on Cable Communication, which issued recommendations for the future, On The Cable. He was a consultant to the Center for International Affairs, a member of Resources for the Future and a director of the Asian Development Corporation. His lifelong sustained, pervasive role in the field of higher education is fondly remembered by colleagues in the words of the Harvard faculty memorial minute which follows:

Edward Sagendorph Mason was a great scholar and a distinguished public servant. Ed first arrived at Harvard in 1919, but moved on to three years at Oxford after only one year. He returned to Harvard in 1923. With time out during the Second World War, Ed remained at Harvard for the next sixty-three years.

Through the first decades of his career, Ed Mason's academic work dealt mainly with the relationship between government and business. In the 1930s his seminar on the industrial structure, monopoly and price rigidity was a centerpiece in this field. In this earlier period and in the 1950s Ed initiated the modern field of Industrial Organization. He created the dominant paradigm of the industry study, exploring the relationship between industry structure, the conduct of firms in the industry, and the economic performance that resulted. Mason's collaborators and students dominated the field and remain important to this day; they include many lawyers as well as economists.

Ed's interest in industrial organization and the relationship between government and business was part of his lifelong concern with issues of public policy. In 1941 Ed and his colleague and old friend, William Langer, went to Washington to help organize the research and analysis branch of what originally was the Office of the Coordinator of Information, later the Office of Strategic Services. The economic division that he created had an enormous range of activity, focusing primarily on the German and Japanese economic ability to make war and on the American capacity to affect this ability through blockade, bombing and sabotage. To this office Ed attracted some of the ablest economists of that generation. Throughout his career, the respect and affection that so many of Ed's colleagues felt toward him enabled Ed to attract an extraordinary group of scholars to one major endeavor after another.

Ed Mason's services to Harvard, in addition to his primary lifetime activities of teaching and research, were numerous and diverse. In the troubled environment of 1969, on the eve of his retirement, Ed was called on to serve as acting Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. Prior to that, from 1947 to 1958, he was Dean of what is now the Kennedy School of Government. It was during this earlier deanship that Ed began his involvement with developing countries, an interest that was to occupy much of the last three decades of his career.

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Edward Mason

—Courtesy of Harvard University

Recommended Reading

Edward Mason(1899-1992), Contemporary Authors Series, by the Gale Reference Tea