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Pat Gunning said: 
 
<<Beyond this, if we grant that a set of judgments must be made -- i.e., 
that all history of thought is whiggish -- then shouldn't the whole idea of 
whiggish history be regarded as a greasy, slippery way of concealling one's 
own views of the judgments made by others?>>  
 
 
This reflects real misunderstanding, or more accuately a category mistake. 
"Whig history" is history written from a presentist perspective on the 
presumption that, as Grattan-Guinness once said, history is "the royal road 
to 'we'". That is, Whig history is written to demonstate how the imperfect 
past has necessarily evolved to reveal us as the end-product.  
 
This has nothing to do with "judgement" or "selection" or "construction". 
One could write history as a Whig constructivist just as one could write as 
a neo-Marxian realist. The HES archives contain a useful introductory 
discussion of a number of these issues (see 
http://www.eh.net/HE/he_resources/subdiscipline.php) in the "Editorials" by 
Hands, Henderson, and others, and the references contained therein. 
 
 
Even more confusing is Lee's argument that "But such a whiggish course 
which delineates the natural unfolding and flowering of neoclassical 
economics would simply reflect the dominance of neoclassical economics and 
beliefs of its adherents and not be a real history course." A course which 
so delineates, or rather constructs, the unfolding of neoclassical 
economics is not necessarily Whiggish any more than a history of Post 
Keynesian economics is anti-Whiggish  
(whatever that might mean). Indeed, to date most historical writing on Post 
Keynesian economics is grotesquely Whiggish, as it is both presentist and 
directed by a constructed narrative past that leads to the "good" present 
("In the beginning was Keynes, and then there was Robinson and Sraffa and 
Kaldor and ...Minsky and Davidson and Eichner and Kregel and ... "). And 
much of the best historical writing about the unfolding of neoclassical 
economics -- Mirowski, Hands, Bernstein, Sent, Ingrao and Israel, Yonay, 
Porter, Morgan, Klein, etc. is nowise connected to a Whig project.  
 
More to the point, I submit, is the proclivity in these discussions to 
write as though economics is a self-contained self-referential system. But 
as the good historical writing of those noted above shows us all: "Nobody 
can separate the 'internal' history of science from the 'external' history 
of its allies. The former does not count as history at all. At best it is 
court historiography, at worst Legends of the Saints. The latter is not 
history of 'science', it is history." (Bruno Latour, The Pasteurization of 
France, p. 218.) 
 
E. Roy Weintraub 
 
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