My Recollection of Chicago and The Doctrine of Laissez Faire

Bert Almon is a professor of English at the University of Alberta and a
poet. He is the author of Calling Texas, Earth Prime, and Mind the Gap.

Stephen Leacock’s long-lost Ph.D. dissertation—The Doctrine of
Laissez Faire (1903)—from the University of Chicago, appears in this
volume with Leacock’s brief essay about his time in Chicago. The essay
has interesting reminiscences of his teachers in graduate school; the
discussion of the celebrated Thorstein Veblen has an unfortunate racial
slur (Leacock complains that Veblen often spoke of the Navaho as having
a culture). The dissertation is a lightweight effort, though Spadoni
suggests that Leacock’s skepticism about economics in his humorous
work (as in the famous “My Bank Account Story”) shows up in the
academic effort. Spadoni’s introduction is an excellent work of
scholarship, but the book as a whole has only marginal interest for
anyone except Leacock scholars.