Honorary degree citation - Paul Lambert*
By: Muriel Armstrong, June 1973
Mr. Chancellor:
I have the honour to present to you Paul Lambert, distinguished Belgian economist, researcher, writer, editor, President and Manager of CIRIEC, the International Centre of Research and Information on Public and Cooperative Economy.
Professor Lambert earned his Doctorate in Law at Liège University in 1935, and for a brief time he was a research student at the London School of Economics. He spent the years from 1940 to 1945 at war and as a prisoner of war; and from his experiences came Hommes perdus à l'Est, a narrative that earned for him the literary prize of the "Prisonnier de guerre". After the war he resumed his research and academic career and became a highly respected theoretician of cooperative economics. When he was Chairman of the Department of Political Economy at Liège he introduced the teaching of cooperation into the curriculum of the Faculty of Law.
He has many publications in economics ranging from works on the quantity theory of money and on John Maynard Keynes, to his treatises on the cooperative economy. His best known work, La doctrine coopérative, won the Louis de Brouckère prize of the Free University of Brussels for the period 1955 to 1959. This well-known book has been translated into many languages. Many of his other works have been translated into English, Russian, Chinese, Norwegian and a dozen more languages.
Professor Lambert is Director of the Socité générale coopérative in Brussels, President of the Cooperative Union in Liege, and a member of the executive of the International Cooperative Alliance, the oldest and largest voluntary organization in the world. Today we honour him for all of these accomplishments, but perhaps most important, we honour him because he is the President of CIRIEC International. Professor Lambert, chosen by Professor Edgard Milhaud, founder of CIRIEC, to be his successor, has helped the organization to expand and flourish. The first branch outside Europe was established in Canada in 1966 with headquarters here at Sir George Williams University under the presidency of Professor Arthur Lermer, Chairman of the Department of Economics; Professor Lambert contributed substantially to its formation. He also edits and writes extensively for The Annals of Public and Cooperative Economy, the periodical that is published by CIRIEC in English, French, and German, and is read in about sixty different countries.
Mr. Chancellor, I am honoured to present to you, on behalf of University Council, and by the authority of the Board of Governors, Professor Paul Lambert, that you may confer on him the degree of Doctor of Laws, honoris causa.
* deceased
