Ivan Moscati raises an important point but we, as an academic  
community, need to be very careful about how we raise it.

HET is a small and, as we've seen, vulnerable field. It seems to me  
that the survival and regeneration of such a field depends on making  
strategic alliances -- all sorts of alliances. Many of us find our  
intellectual homes (and research grant funding) in departments of  
economics. Many of us find refuge in science studies programs. Others  
are in philosophy or humanities departments. I may have one of the  
oddest affiliations in a medical school. But we all share a belief  
that the history of economics is important enough to preserve and,  
presumably, we all share our historical insights with the colleagues  
we find around us. It's not surprising to me that the result is a  
variety of approaches.

My point is, we come in many flavours and we do work of different  
kinds. It seems to me that we don't want to portray our "future" as an  
"either-or" proposition, but rather a "both-and" alternative. The more  
different approaches to the HET that we can encourage, the greater our  
potential audiences and the more lucrative our sources of research  
funding.

None of that means that we ought to be happy about a bureau of  
statistics deciding how we should be categorized among academic  
disciplines, notwithstanding their need to generate categories of  
optimal size.
 
Evelyn L. Forget