In memoriam: Charles Kershaw Rowley.

• Author: Munger, Michael
• Position: In memoriam

A major force in the debate over the place of liberty in human society passed away on August 2, 2013. Charles Rowley was born in 1939 and attended the University of Nottingham for his undergraduate and Ph.D. work. He then took graduate courses at the London School of Economics under the supervision of A. W. "Bill" Phillips. Phillips had been one of the first economists to use computers to show (as it turned out) that many empirical relationships do not reflect policy-exploitable causal chains. Though Rowley long admired Phillips as a person, the so-called Phillips Curve represented much of what Rowley thought was wrong with macroeconomics.

Rowley's primary graduate training was in industry studies (his 1964 dissertation addressed the British Monopolies Commission and was published almost immediately by Allen and Unwin in London, quite an achievement then or now). His interests were in what American economists call "industrial organization" and "public economics," though the methods and approach used then share little with those fields today.

It is hopeless to try to catalog all the contributions Rowley made as an editor, writer, and scholar. He had a restless mind and a compulsive, energetic life and moved swiftly up the ranks from lecturer to senior lecturer, reader, and then dean of social sciences and later Economics Department head at the Universities of Kent at Canterbury, York, and Newcastle on Tyne.

After visiting at the Public Choice Center in Blacksburg, Virginia, two different summers in the 1970s, he moved to George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia, in 1984...