Remembering Allen Fenichel, 1936-2018

I met Allen in September of 1980. He was 44, I was 24. I had just arrived in Montreal to begin my economics degree at McGill and was ready to ‘take on’ the economists. It was the first session of the first course of the program ‘Introduction to Economics’, which was to be taught by Professor Fenichel to an audience of 300 students. Although I didn’t know much economics, I considered myself ‘critical’. I walked into the auditorium fully expecting McGill’s Economics faculty to be gatekeepers of capitalism and conservative apostles of ‘neoclassical economics’ – and I had made it my mission to debunk their dogma. But I was quickly disappointed.